Sa « SSNS 
RRR SS 
X SRA 
ERIS aS RN 
SRS RSSOSR 
SSO 


SEN 
SNS 


SN 

Wrettateee teat 

SP 

SSS 

Rhee SNS 

ER oe 0 ISS 

SN AN 
SKN 

RRANOY 
AS 


SRS NENG, 
SSNS SKE NV LE OS ‘ EOS RON 
SS ORNS 


sf 
a Se) 

Noes 
SR 
ARIE 


. 


. 
Ss 
NS 
Se 
oS es 
RNS 
SS TSS 


SS 


s, Sh 
See 
Serete 


. 
SSS 
SS 


~ 
SS 
» SRS 


RS SS 
*! ARON . 

SS RS SS %, SS SS Se . te 
\ re . SSS 

S S ahs \ SS . 
SS Ss ~ : . S SIAN 


. 

Sa SRA) S 

SN SSssg 
SN SSS SS 
SSS 


OD 
Sh . SSNS 
8) SSS SNR A 
. SIAN SHAN SS SS SQN SSS 
SSN . \ AS SS 
" SS ST \ Sh 
RO N Sy 
. SVT . 


TOS 


. . SNS 
Ds ERA S 

: SAS 
SS NS 


y . 
WANS y 
~ S . SS 
we ~ . SS S 


y 
SRN N 

.. SOY » SS 

. es 


SS 
SN 
: 


“ WN 
SN “ 


ys 


Roe 
SRN 


3 
SEN 


. SS 

















THE NEW MAN 
AND THE DIVINE SOCIETY 


gS 
9 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK - BOSTON « CHICAGO - DALLAS 
ATLANTA » SAN FRANCISCO 


MACMILLAN & CO., LimTEep 
LONDON - BOMBAY » CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 


_ THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lip, 
TORONTO 


omy =| bid} of fp 
ND” an, 


JAN.13 1941 


THE NEW MAN. 






AND THE DIVINE SOC sent 


A STUDY IN CHRISTIANITY 


VOLUME [| 


BY 


RICHARD ROBERTS 


NEW YORK 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
: 1926 


All rights reserved 


Copyright, 1926, 
Br THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 


Set up and electrotyped. 
Published September, 1926, 





Printed in the United States of America by 
THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK. 


INTRODUCTION 


The substance of the following pages was given 
as the Southworth Lectures in the Theological 
School in Harvard University in April of this year. 
The book is intended to be the first instalment of 
a study which has engaged me for some time; and 
if circumstances enable me to carry out my design, 
two more volumes will follow this one, dealing 
respectively with the revelation of God in Christ 
and with the Christian experience and ethic. I am 
well aware of the hardihood of so pretentious an 
enterprise on the part of a person whose days are 
spent in an exacting city ministry; and I have no 
doubt that the work will show many signs of the 
pressure under which it has to be done. 


I desire to say something at this point concerning 
the presuppositions that underlie the argument of 
this book. 


1. In a recent symposium of great importance, 
published under the title of Science, Religion and 
Reality, the upshot seems to be that, in the dilemma 
between the mechanistic and the religious views of 
life, ““we have no choice but to acquiesce provision- 
ally in an unresolved dualism.’”’ It appears that we 
are to find an ad interim refuge in a delimitation of 
frontiers. Mechanistic biology is evidently here to 
stay; but its jurisdiction over other fields, and par- 
ticularly over religion, is not to be admitted. 

, 5 


6 INTRODUCTION 


Religion and Science need not, henceforth, so we 
are assured, regard each other as enemies; let each 
do its own work in its own way, showing to the 
other the good-will and the courtesy of a peer. 
The fight is ended by separating the parties, not by 
reconciling them. They are, in legal phrase, bound 
over to keep the peace; but not yet are they to be 
yoke-fellows. 

For my own part, I have no objection to a pro- 
visional dualism, that is, a dualism regarded merely 
as a bivouac on the march; and where the masters 
pronounce for a provisional dualism as between 
mechanistic and religious views of life, a journey- 
man can do no more than acquiesce. But even a 
journeyman may be permitted to wonder whether, 
if the march had been pressed a little further before 
calling a halt, a more satisfactory inn might not 
have been found. At least it may be asked whether 
we might not conceivably (to vary our figure a 
little) have turned the flank of the present obstruc- 
tion and sought out a line which would not have 
compelled us to immure theology and science so 
implacably each in its separate cell. Should we not 
decline any longer to regard religion as lying outside 
the world of “‘nature’’ and treat it frankly as a 
biological phenomenon? If religion is not a mani- 
festation of life, then it is nothing; and if it is a 
manifestation of life, then it must stand somehow 
in an organic relation to the rest of life; and the 
religious life becomes a part of the subject matter 
of biology. 

I am of course aware that there have been psy- 
chological essays in the reduction of religion into 


INTRODUCTION 7 


certain primitive elements of nature; but I am not 
now thinking of that, even though it were worth 
thinking about. The common result of this pro- 
cess has been to display religion as an eccentricity 
or an aberration of life. This result fails in a quite 
absurd degree to do justice to the historical achieve- 
ment of religion; and in any case, the process by 
which the result has been reached is subject to all 
the errors commonly accompanying an analysis 
which from the nature of the case must be chiefly 
speculative. Meantime, until psychology knows its 
own mind more confidently than it does to-day— 
each psychologist appears to 


“‘say his say, 
His scheme of the weal or woe’’— 


we had better go on quietly and unperturbedly 
with the normal business of religion. 

There is much to be gained from treating religion 
as a part of the subject matter of biology. If any- 
one supposes that this is to expose religion to the 
peril of being involved in the general reign of 
biological mechanism, the answer is two-fold. 
First, if religion is an affair of bio-physics and bio- 
chemistry, the sooner we know it the better. 
Second, if religion is a genuine biological phenome- 
non, then its own special characters must have their 
own place in the totality of life and must so far 
enter into our final biological constructions. It 
is true that, if religion is an organic part of the life- 
process, it must display the general characters of 
that process; but equally if it has any special and 
distinctive characters of its own, these too must be 


8 INTRODUCTION 


taken as being involved in the total life-process 
and must be accounted for in any complete inter- 
pretation of it. It may not inconceivably turn out 
that the inclusion of the study of religion within 
the compass of biology may furnish us with the 
clue that will reveal to us the actual scope of the 
mechanistic principle in life and tell us where and 
why it ceases to operate. Mr. Needham maintains 
that “though mechanism in biology is perfectly 
justified and indeed essential, it cannot be applied 
to psychology.”* But why? Where does the 
mechanical principle run out? Perhaps if we 
approach the problem from the other, that is, the 
religious end, we may find our answer. 

However, that is not the special purpose of these 
pages. Roughly, the standpoint here taken may 
be stated in this way: Supposing we look at relig- 
ion as a biological phenomenon, what shall we 
make of it? I propose to show—not as a complete 
interpretation of Christianity, of course—that there 
are important ways in which Christianity may be 
regarded as continuing the development of life as 
evolutionary biology has revealed it to us. Natu- 
rally, I do not pretend to cover the whole ground 
here; indeed, I shall here follow throughout only 
a single line, but I hope to show that the argument 
has some significant consequences for our practical 
thinking upon the present task of Christianity. 

2. That the religious life is here assumed to 
form part of the subject matter of biology does 
not imply that religion is regarded by the writer as 


* Science, Religion and Reality, p. 256. 


INTRODUCTION 9 


belonging only to what is known as the domain 
of natural science. On the contrary, I wish to 
affirm that religion involves revelation as much as 
evolution (to my mind) seems to involve religion. 
And this brings us to another dualism to which we 
must provisionally consent. 

It seems to be commonly accepted among folk 
of a liberal turn that the fundamentalist controversy 
in the United States is an eruption of obscurantism 
pure and simple. Walter Bagehot in his essay on 
Lady Mary Wortley Montague says that, when she 
brought back the practice of inoculation from her 
Eastern travels, “‘like every improver, she was 
roughly spoken to. Medical men were angry 
because the practice was not in their books; and 
conservative men were cross at the agony of a new 
idea.’’ It is a short and easy explanation of funda- 
mentalism that it is an epidemic of crossness pro- 
voked by the agony of the idea of evolution; and 
that consequently it does not deserve to be taken 
seriously by the enlightened. It is, however, not 
quite so simple as that. When we have said all 
that should be said in criticism of the ignorance 
and the intolerance on which the fundamentalist 
ferment feeds, it still remains worth asking whether 
it is so much ado about nothing as we too easily 
suppose. I venture to suggest that, when the con- 
troversy has been stripped of its extravagances, it 
turns out to be a projection into public of a private 
dilemma present to-day in most minds that are both 
religious and liberal. 

The bugbear of the fundamentalist is evolution. 
No doubt he acquires some of his following because 


10 INTRODUCTION 


the evolution doctrine casts an unpleasant suspicion 
on Mr. Babbitt’s family-tree. But this is adventi- 
tious, and not of the essence of the matter. What 
is at issue is the change in the conception of God 
which you must consent to if you are going to 
shelve “‘creation”’ in favor of ‘‘evolution.’’ (It does 
not help you in the least at this point to say that 
what you believe in is “creative evolution.’’) Crea- 
tion implies a transcendent God; and while logi- 
cally evolution may not require us to conceive of 
God as immanent, it is nevertheless true that evolu- 
tion and immanence make good company in the 
mind. Creation requires a God standing outside 
the Universe, bringing it into being by his fiat, and 
operating upon it from without in perfect freedom 
according to His Will. Evolution, on the other 
hand, suggests a God within the Universe, involved 
in and therefore limited by its processes and some- 
how fulfilling Himself in its development. From 
this follows much more. The traditional theology 
is conceived and stated against the background of a 
God regarded exclusively as transcendent; and to 
admit the idea of evolution is therefore to imperil 
the whole faith once delivered to the saints. For 
a transcendence-theology cannot, so far as I see, 
be dialectically reconciled with a thoroughgoing 
immanence-theology. In these matters evangelical 
liberals have rather seriously compromised them- 
selves. “They find themselves unwilling to be “‘off 
with the old,” and they nevertheless want to be 
“on with the new.’’ They adhere to the tradi- 
tional terminology, but try to invest it with an 
immanental content; and the fundamentalist cap- 


INTRODUCTION il 


tains are not altogether wrong in challenging the 
honesty of this procedure. In any case, the feeble- 
ness of the modernist parry to the fundamentalist 
assault is not to be denied. You cannot fight suc- 
cessfully if you are trying to straddle a pair of 
horses what time your adversary is solid in the 
saddle of one of the pair. I am not now speaking 
of the defense of the principle of evolution against 
the rhetoric of the late Mr. Bryan; that was a simple 
matter. I am thinking rather of the indifferent 
figure cut by the apologists of what in the United 
States is called ‘“‘modernism,’’ when the term is a 
convenient label for a Protestant Christianity which 
has truckled to the evolution heresy. 

But to say that the liberal evangelical is not 
honest when he reads a ‘modernist’ content into 
the traditional terminology is not the last word 
upon the matter. He is in a cleft stick. For being 
both religious and liberal, he cannot rule out trans- 
cendence and yet must acknowledge immanence. 
Being religious, God must be present to him as a 
Real Other—prayer, which is the most character- 
istic exercise of religion, is not prayer without a 
conviction of the ‘‘otherness’’ of God. Moreover, 
he sees that the logic of a self-consistent transcen- 
dentalism leads to the sterility of a deraciné Deism; 
while the logic of immanentalism ends in the moral 
paralysis of Pantheism. And so when he invests 
the traditional terminology with a modernist con- 
tent, he is trying to find a modus vivendi in the 
face of the dilemma. It is at best a feeble and 
clumsy compromise, and it leaves him open to the 
charge that he says one thing and means another. 


42 | INTRODUCTION 


What the traditional theology calls the Incarnation 
is a specific and direct intervention of God in the 
person of His only-begotten Son in the affairs of 
the world; and no amount of clever manipulation 
can square it with the theory of evolution. It 
means only and starkly that the Incarnate Word 
came down from the throne; and it excludes any 
view that represents Him as coming up from the 
ranks. Yet if the doctrine of evolution is true, 
and if we are to take it as a mode of the Divine 
Immanence, how can we say that Jesus stands out- 
side of it? Yet by what possibility can an act of 
Incarnation be construed as a process of evolution? 

It is not the theologian alone who is in a tight 
corner. ‘The philosopher has a similar dilemma 
on his hands. FP. H. Bradley was a stern unbending 
fxbsolutist—one might almost say a philosophical 
fundamentalist—who carried out the logic of his 
System to a point at which one seems to be left with 
a static, colorless Absolute in which right and 
wrong, black and white, manage to exist together 
only by the process of canceling each other out. 
He does not truckle to the heresy of a “growing 
God” or anything like it; and it is a serious matter, 
for it introduces contingency and chance into the 
universe. But what is one to do? There is devel- 
opment in the universe; and nowadays the idea of 
development is applied not merely to life on this 
planet but to the whole universe. How then can 
the Absolute not be involved in the process? In 
which case, what becomes of the Absolute? It is 
plainly either the relatively Absolute or the abso- 
lutely Relative. “The greatest of all difficulties,” 


INTRODUCTION 13 


says Edward Caird, “‘is the union of the conception 
of God as a self-determining principle manifested 
in a development which includes nature and man, 
with a conception of Him as in a sense eternally 
complete in Himself.’”’ That is the problem; and 
it still awaits solution. 


Why [wrote Sir Henry Jones to A. C. 
Bradley] does Nettleship say that a “‘process 
to a constantly higher being seems a logical 
impossibility?’’ Or as the question pinches 
me, how can the Absolute be or do anything 
if the static conception is valid? And why is 
the impossibility of new and higher perfec- 
tions higher than their possibility? Is it non- 
sense to think of the most perfect as that 
which is a self-enriching love, a love growing 
by its own activity? Was Spinoza’s God 
capable of endlessly new radiations? Is that 
perfect which is at the end of its power and 
possibilities? Can the whole whose existence 
is due to itself only, and within which all 
activities take place, be in and of these activi- 
ties and yet static? If it is not static, why 
should its activities be reiterative and not 
purposive? I don’t know anyone who thinks 
this notion worth discussing in these days, but 
I don’t like an Absolute which is aye at its 
limits. If they are his own, is he not beyond 
them? 


Where Edward Caird confesses difficulties and 
Sir Henry Jones can only ask questions, it is not for 
a journeyman to speak. But it is evident that the 


14 INTRODUCTION 


philosopher has his cleft stick no less than the 
theologian; and it is essentially the same dilemma 
in both cases—how Eternal Perfection is to be 
reconciled with the idea of Process. 

The dilemma, of course, is not new. But it is 
not within the scope of these pages to follow its 
history. For our purpose, it is enough to note its 
presence in St. Paul. It would perhaps be wrong 
to say that it exists in St. Paul as a dilemma. But 
St. Paul has two distinct theologies, the one deriv- 
ing from his Jewish origins, the other from the 
Greek atmosphere which he breathed for a consid- 
erable part of his life. From his Judaism, he inher- 
ited a God wholly transcendental; and with this 
God were associated ideas of monarchy, legislation 
and jurisdiction. "The theology which he builds 
upon this foundation is a theology of transac- 
tions; the great terms are Justification, Redemption, 
Propitiation, Adoption, all being representations of 
things done for or upon men by an outside God. 
But from the Stoics, whether as Sir William 
Ramsay suggests, through teachers at Tarsus, or by 
way of the Book of Wisdom, he acquired ideas of 
immanence; and so he has a theology according 
to which God does not work upon man so much 
as within him. “It is God that worketh in you 
both to will and to do of His good pleasure’: and 
in his later mind, the idea of the “Christ within 
you” evidently occupies the foreground. The two 
theologies reflect the same experience; but in the 
one the Christian experience is interpreted as a 
change of status wrought from without: in the 
other it is described as a change of nature wrought 


INTRODUCTION 15 


from within. It is not suggested that St. Paul 
was aware of a contradiction between these two 
constructions. He was occupied with a practical 
task which precluded much concern for an academic 
coherency of thought. He was expounding some- 
thing that had happened to him; and now he did 
it in a Jewish idiom, and at another time in a Greek. 

But if St. Paul was not troubled by the dilemma, 
we cannot escape it. In modern times it has become 
acute because of the felt need of reconciling the 
traditional acceptances of thought and religion with 
the idea of a cosmos in process. We were brought 
up on the cosmogony supported by a fixed and 
unchanging framework of time-space. Biological 
evolution disturbed our grandfathers; but their 
grandchildren have become reconciled to it, being 
convinced that, whatever might take place in the 
sphere of life on this planet, the cosmos itself was 
solid and safe. But now we cannot be sure of the 
cosmos. Our measurements of time and space seem 
to have only a local applicability; and Euclid who 
once held undisputed sway in geometry is now 
‘apparently one of a company, each with a different 
geometry. We seem to be living a wide-open 
universe, not in a closed system. We have to 
accommodate ourselves to the idea of an unfinished 
universe; and this must inevitably affect our 
theology. We contemplate a process of develop- 
ment which seems to embrace everything that 1s, 
to include ourselves and somehow to involve God. 
The idea of God that did duty at Nicea is no longer 
adequate. 

Obviously, we have started a question that 


16 INTRODUCTION 


requires for its discussion more than a few lines in 
an introduction. I hope to return to it at a later 
time. What I have to do here is to state the attitude 
that I take up to this dilemma. Logically, trans- 
cendence and immanence are irreconcilable notions; 
yet the facts as I see them compel me to accept both. 
In consequence, I have to settle down to an insuper- 
able dualism in my theology. Insuperable, that is, 
for the present; for I do not believe that this dual- 
ism is permanently insuperable. Sometime it will 
be resolved. In the meantime, I have to make up 
my mind to live with two theologies at the same 
time—on the one hand the substance of the tradi- 
tional theology of the creeds, and on the other the 
nascent theology of immanence. Obviously, I can 
hold neither as final. But for the time being, I 
- mean to hold fast to the great doctrines of Inspira- 
tion, Revelation, Incarnation, Redemption and 
Grace; and also to accept the elements of an imma- 
nence-theology—tthe Inner Light, the Indwelling 
Christ, the Kingdom of God as a phase of the 
unfolding of life, and Jesus as the crown of biologi- 
cal evolution. I[ refuse to accept the dilemma 
“either—or’’; I prefer to affirm a comprehensive 
‘““‘both—and’’; and I believe that to be truer to the 
facts, as I apprehend them. I shall naturally 
involve myself in many verbal inconsistencies; but 
in a world of relative knowledge that is hardly to 
be avoided. If I am charged with uttering contra- 
dictory things, I will answer simply that I cannot 
help myself, things being as they are. I mean to 
ee a traditionalist and a modernist, as far as in me 
ies. 


INTRODUCTION 17 


What is intended in the pages that follow is a 
modest and unpretentious essay in the theology of 
immanence; and it is offered rather tremulously as 
a contribution toward that ultimate synthesis of 
thought concerning the truth and the life of Chris- 
tianity out of which the theology of the future will 
be built up. How much the essay is worth, it is 
not for me to say. 

RICHARD ROBERTS 
Montreal, 
April 1926. 


\ fae % v2 A 


gat 





PART I 
MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 


THE MOVING PICTURE OF LIFE . 
NATURE AND MAN 


. INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP . ; 
THE IMPULSE TOWARD FREEDOM ; 


THE INSTINCTS OF ASSOCIATION . 


. THE SOCIAL BASIS OF ETHICS . 
. THE BELOVED COMMUNITY . 

. SOCIETY AND THE STATE. . 

. STATE AND EMPIRE . ; 

. THE REACTIONARY MIND 

. THE RADICAL MIND 

. THE ECONOMIC MOTIVE . 


PAR EI 


THE NEW MAN AND THE NEW SOCIETY 


DUT IN 


WN 


. MAN AND RELIGION . 


THE ‘‘GooD NEws’”’ : 
THE NEW “EMERGENT” 


. THE NEw MAN AND THE NEw SOCIETY : 
. THE QUICKENED SOUL Danita 


THE DIVINE COMMONWEALTH 


PART III 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 


. THE EARLY CHURCH AND THE WORLD 
. ST. AUGUSTINE . AWA aT Oe 
. THE DARK AGES 


67 


NS 
© 


ear 


It 
2 
3 
4 
aH 
6 
7 
8 


No 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 
THE MEDIEVAL DAWN i euGeeeciaeh sees eee 
THE MEDIEVAL (UONITYiio (os tala ae eae eee 
DISINTEGRATION: c3b6 beeen alk. ee a 
THE ETHICAL REVOLT ci whi iicse ere eae 
OTHE INTELLECTUAL REVOLT yr) uate 
“THB CRELIGIOUS REVOLT) tanwiie so ie eee 
. PROTESTANTISM AND CATHOLICISM .. . 145 


PART IV 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 
THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH AND THE CHRIS- 


TIANIZATION OF TXTFE ee 2) Co 
- Tir’ STRATEGY ‘OF THE’ CHURCH’. 7) .3 eros 
. THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL ORDER. . 169 
. CONSIDERATION AND DEVELOPMENT. . . 178 
MORALS AND VALUES S20 24 7 ee ee 
Tee CHRISTIAN ETHIC 3120 ae 
Tie NEED OR RENEWAL.i4)0 55) sure 
‘Tie SPRINGS OR LIFE 22 ee 
PEST f ROME AUN PI NY i OS A aa 


THE NEW MAN 
AND THE DIVINE SOCIETY 





PART I 
MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 


1. THE Movinc PicTuRE oF LIFE. The 
world is evidently biocentric.1 The round earth 
is the frame; life is the picture. It would appear 
that, though the frame was made before the picture, 
it was made to suit the picture, but it is not easy to 
say where the frame ends and the picture begins. 
Vast as are the achievements of biological science, 
it has not yet divined the secret of the amazing 
spectacle of life. Concerning the forms which life 
has taken upon itself, and the processes by which 
it is sustained and propagated, biology has told us 
much and is daily telling us more. But the origin 
and the end of life are still hidden in mystery. 
Experimental embryology, bio-physics and bio- 
chemistry may some day solve the problem of cell- 
organization; but even then we shall be faced with 
the enigma of life itself. 

If we speak of life as a picture, it is necessary to 
add that it is a moving picture. Man cannot see 


‘The hills where his life rose 
Or the sea where it goes’; 


but we are on more hopeful ground when we ask 

whether the movement has direction. Biology has 

gathered a large body of data and has set them out 

in orderly fashion; and no candid mind looking 

upon the facts finds it easy to escape the conviction 
23 


24 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


that there has been a long process of development 
from invisible biococci up at last to man. Some- 
thing that began as a very minute, perhaps ultra- 
microscopic, unit of chromatin has grown into 
something that thinks and wills, tills the earth, 
bridges the seas and ranges the skies; that has built 
the Parthenon and Notre Dame de Chartres, com- 
posed the Messtah and the Ninth Symphony, writ- 
ten the Republic, the Divine Comedy and Hamlet. 
The growth has taken an inconceivable length of 
time. It has proceeded by a countless series of small 
advances—small, that is, in retrospect, but each at 
its own moment a sort of miracle—and not without 
failures and miscarriages. And the end is not yet. 
It is true that there are many gaps in our knowl- 
edge of this long pilgrimage, but these are slowly 
being filled up. We should with our present knowl- 
edge be able to gain some idea of the direction of 
the goal. 


9. NATURE AND MAN. The crown, so far, of 
the process of life is man; and man’s first business, 
would he know himself, is to learn that he is of a 
piece with all life. He has risen from the ranks, 
but he is still “‘sib’ to the rank and file. His roots 
are in the lowly soil of living nature; and while in 
his pride he may be disposed to ignore his origin, 
he can in nowise disown it. He is a “biological 
phenomenon” as all his fathers were, back to the 
first biococus. 

Nevertheless, he has climbed to a place on the 
ladder which puts him some rungs above the next 
living climber. Those empty rungs once gave foot- 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY PAs 


hold to living things; but they had climbed beyond 
their strength. Being unable to hold on, they fell 
off and perished. A few of them have left their 
bones about; and we have made fancy pictures of 
them as they were in life. Perhaps we shall some- 
time be able to assign a tenant to every rung of the 
ladder; but in the meantime, there is a great gulf 
between man and his nearest living kin. There 
are, to be sure, striking family-likenesses that bear 
Witness to the kinship; but there are differences, 
vast and deep. 

On this account, there is need of much caution, 
whether we are bringing man to the interpretation 
of living nature or bringing living nature to the 
interpretation of man. In this region there are a 
hundred pitfalls awaiting the unwary. Herbert 
Spencer fell into one of them when he discussed the 
state as an “‘organism’’; and many of us have 
fallen—and for that matter are still falling—into 
the pit of applying the aesthetic and ethical valua- 
tions of mankind to the processes of nature. When 
we speak of the ruthlessness or the wastefulness of 
nature, we are applying tests which doubtless have 
validity for the criticism of human conduct, but 
we have no means of knowing whether they actu- 
ally correspond to anything that is actually going 
on in a pond or a jungle. Things are not always 
what they seem, even nearer home than a forest. 
Besides, there are still considerable tracts of unex- 
plored territory in the world of living nature; and 
generalization even yet should be diffident. Nor 
should we forget, despite the marvelous power and 
beauty of the instruments by which man pursues 


26 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


and acquires knowledge, that there are palpable 
limits to the range of human understanding. Our 
affirmations should always be attended by modesty. 
It becomes clearer that there are in the human 
ensemble obscure powers of which we are only 
fitfully and dimly aware, and which we do not 
know how to evoke and to use. But there seems 
to be no reason to suppose that these powers will 
go unused forever. A day may conceivably come 
when our present scientific constructions may seem 
to our successors as crude and impertinent as 
alchemy does to the modern chemist; and the road 
ahead of us is very long. Here as elsewhere we 
have to make what we can of “‘a reign of relativity.” 

Still, there are some gains which even in the 
present state of our knowledge we have good reason 
to believe permanently valid. It is hard to conceive 
that there will be hereafter any doubt raised con- 
cerning the continuity and the evolution of life 
or even concerning the general direction of the 
process. In any case, it is upon our present convic- 
tions about these matters that we of to-day must 
build our house of life. 


3. INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP. Speaking broadly, 
it would appear that one of the main factors 
in determining the general character of the 
life-process has been the interplay of two co- 
efficient principles of individuation and organ- 
ization. There was probably a long span 
of time and evolution between the first emer- 
gence of life and the appearance of the first 
living cell; and of this process we know nothing. 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 27 


But in the cell we have a unit of life, a closed 
system (so to speak) with a complete if rudimen- 
tary life of its own. It is not etymologically indi- 
vidual; for it is characteristic of the cell that it is 
divisible, and that at this stage it is able to divide 
itself into two such units as were its own original 
self. But it has an identity of its own; it is a 
separate and single thing. 

Following the cell, there was a long experimental 
period in which the cells joined together to form a 
larger and more elaborate unit. First came what is 
commonly called the colonial form, in which the 
cells—in obedience to who knows what blind 
instinct of association—attached themselves to- 
gether in groups, yet not so closely that the group 
might not break up again into individual cells and 
the individuals resume their separate lives. “The 
term colonial is a somewhat ambiguous description 
of this form of association, as the historical “‘col- 
ony’ has always been something more than a mere 
aggregation of individuals; and it is suggested that 
homogeneous is a more exact description. “There- 
after appeared an association in which the cells of 
the group began to be modified for different tasks. 
They were, so to speak, told off to different jobs 
and were accordingly specialized and codrdinated 
into a new multicellular organism. In this form of 
association, the cells ceased to be capable of an 
independent life of their own. 

The multicellular organism, in its turn, becomes 
the unit of a new group. It possesses some instinct 
of association and proceeds to foregather with its 
kind. The association may at first be no more than 


28 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY, 


a device of self-preservation, a safeguard against 
the hazards of an unknown environment. But 
whatever its origin, it seems to be there. The 
resulting groups appear to be of two kinds, roughly 
corresponding to the homogeneous and the organic 
grouping of cells. In the former case, the indi- 
vidual units are joined together without any loss 
of individuality and are in no way specialized. 
They are able to break away from the group and to 
live independent lives. Of this kind are the pack 
of wolves and the herd of cattle: In the latter case, 
there is a new vital unit with all sorts of specialized 
and coérdinated functions. The unit is seen in its 
extreme form in a beehive or an anthill. This kind 
of unit is achieved, however, at some cost to its 
individual members. No ant, it appears, is a com- 
plete ant or ever can become.one. It is fashioned 
for its own specific task and is capable of nothing 
else. In the beehive, the queen bee is a specially 
contrived egg-laying organism; the drones are 
merely contributory to the queen bee’s task of 
maternity; while the honey-gathering bees are 
sexually neutral. “The unitary life of the beehive 
is gained at the cost of truncated bee personality. 

We may for convenience of later reference speak 
of the first class as the herd-type: of the second as 
the hive-type. In the first there is no real solidar- 
ity; in the second there is solidarity, but it is gained 
at the expense of individuality. We may surmise 
that nature is aiming at producing at once a real 
individual and a real society. Its intention is pre- 
sumably to preserve a full individuality without 
sacrificing the society, and an organic society with- 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 29 


out sacrificing the integrity of the individual life. 
It is this circumstance that seems to create the 
peculiar problems of man in relation to his society. 


4. THE IMPULSE TOWARD FREEDOM. To 
begin with, nature has always given the individual 
something of a fight for his life. Perhaps the 
“struggle for existence’ has been too narrowly 
conceived when it has been regarded as a fight for 
mere survival. In any case, it has had other conse- 
quences. It has helped to evoke certain qualities of 
adaptability, resourcefulness and plasticity, quali- 
ties which at least pave the way to a comparative 
independence and freedom. Something of this we 
may trace even in the primitive forms of life. 
Among the Protozoa, where at one time it was 
confidently supposed that life was wholly con- 
trolled and automatic in its reactions, recent research 
has shown that behavior is not forced and mechan- 
ical, but within certain limits flexible and spon- 
taneous, and is ultimately fixed by a process of trial 
and error.* This flexibility of adaptation increases 
on the road until, with the evolution of the cen- 
tral nervous system, it grows into a positive if 
incomplete control of environment and a relative 
independence of it. 

Connected with this is the impulse toward 
mobility with a corresponding extension of the 
environment. At the point where the main trunk 
of life bifurcated into plant and animal, the plant 
because it clung to the soil forfeited the possibility 
of advance in the direction of freedom and inde- 
pendence and probably consciousness.? The imme- 


30 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


diate future was for the free-moving animal; but 
every gain it made in mobility was made at a risk, 
for it had to shed more and more of its protective 
impedimenta. This was the price of its srowth; 
and because it paid the price, it reached ever higher 
levels of flexibility and plasticity, which carried 
with them increasing independence and control of 
the environment. Moreover, the environment was 
correspondingly extended;; and it seems to be true 
that the expansion of the environment may be taken 
as a measure of the progress in evolution. The 
stabilization of blood temperature in the higher 
forms of life, which enables them to range over 
larger areas of the world’s surface by making them 
comparatively independent of variations of tem- 
perature, is an instance of a modification favorable 
to the extension of the environment. The last term 
of this process was the improvement of the mind. 
which brought still more control and independence 
of the environment. Little by little grew processes 
of reasoning, the formation of ideas, the quickening 
of imagination, the faculty of generalization; and 
presently appeared the power to store up experience 
in the form of tradition, so that the present might 
be seen in a longer perspective and dealt with in 
the light of general principles. “The whole process 
seems to have been intended to produce at last some 
free and independent individual with a faculty of 
bringing his environment increasingly under con- 
trol and an impulse to push the frontiers of his 
environment ever farther into the unknown. This 
is what some writers mean when they say that the 
end of the process of evolution is freedom. 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 31 


It is, in any case, bred in man’s bone that he was 
called to freedom; and it would require some hardi- 
hood to deny the biological lineage of this vocation. 
The most significant and moving episodes of his 
history are those in which he stands affirming his 
right to be and to grow into the full human thing 
that it is in him to be, and fighting for room to 
realize himself. In these latter days of the world, 
it is true that the worst enemies of his freedom have 
been of his own house, and that the struggle for 
freedom has been a civil war within mankind. But 
it has been the occasion of noble and heroic achieve- 
ment, and it has now become so deeply rooted in 
his nature that nothing is able to stir his blood so 
effectually as the report that freedom is in danger, 
though it does not always appear that his appre- 
hensions are well grounded. 


5. THE INSTINCT OF ASSOCIATION. We may 
be falling into anthropomorphism when we sup- 
pose that the evolution of multicellular organisms 
and the growth of social groups—whether of ants 
or of men—are phases of the same tendency. Yet 
the analogy between them is sufficiently close to 
lend some color to the thought of their natural 
kinship. Even the tendency in both cases toward 
increase in the size of units seems to show that an 
analogous impulse is at work in them, and so indeed 
does the circumstance that, in one as in the other, 
there seems to be a point beyond which increase 
in size brings with it a decrease of fitness to survive. 
Overgrown animal species and overgrown human 
societies tend to disappear; so also do overspecial- 


32 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


ized forms of both. But it is not necessary to labor 
the point. An impulse of association is undoubt- 
edly present on both planes. or the rest the 
special problems of human association arise not so 
much from their similarity to, but their difference 
from, the forms of multicellular organisms and of 
the more highly developed sub-human societies. It 
may be said summarily that the peculiar problem 
of human association is to produce a society that 
is neither a herd nor a hive. 

In man, nature has produced a form of life pos- 
sessed of conscious freedom and of the desire to live 
out its own life and to realize itself, but which is 
nevertheless incapable of realizing itself save in and 
through a social existence. Just as the struggle for 
existence was probably at first a fight for mere 
survival, but produced other important results, so 
the association impulse may have been in the begin- 
ning nothing more than a survival-device, a special 
form of protective armor which, however, revealed 
other possibilities of which life was not slow to 
take advantage. The association seemed even to 
gain a value for its own sake; for it is evident that 
some animals find a real satisfaction in sociability. 
Without question, the codperative life has made for 
the expansion and the refinement, that is, for a 
specifically qualitative improvement of life, no less 
than for its preservation and increase. It is to his 
social existence that we must ascribe the intellectual 
and aesthetic characters that are the peculiar distinc- 
tion of man. “In fellowship,’ says George Mere- 
dith, ‘‘religion has its founts.’”” And so indeed do 
all other things that give man his real singularity 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 33 


among his living kin. It was a social existence 
that made possible speech and writing, systematic 
thought and the creation of aesthetic and ethical 
values. 

But it hardly needs proof that man has not yet 
reached a form of social life which is in keeping 
with the height of his individual achievement. It 
may be true that society lags behind the individual 
on other planes; it certainly does so in mankind.* 
Even without his social life he could not be what 
he has become; but how comes he to outstrip his 
society so conspicuously? “The answer appears to 
be that, having become self-conscious, free, capable 
of a life of his own broader than any specific func- 
tion which he may perform within the group, he 
tends to be at odds with the group. His impulse 
is to be himself, to realize his own complete indi- 
viduality; and that in some degree tends to make 
him anti-social, despite the fact that he cannot be 
his whole possible self except in and by a social 
existence. He stands to his society in a relation at 
once of attraction and of opposition. He cannot 
do without a social life; yet he makes war upon his 
society. His desire for self-realization, working 
itself out in self-assertions and self-indulgences, 
‘injures the human environment which is necessary 
to his growth. Because the other individuals who 
compose this human environment are doing the same 
thing, the social existence of men consists in little 
more than getting and keeping near enough to one 
another to be able to exploit one another. Human 
society is at best a precarious equilibrium of forces 
of mutual association and mutual repulsion; and 


34. NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


as we see it to-day ameng ourselves, it is ‘‘the lim- 
ited and legalized struggle of men and women to 
get the better of one another.’’® 

Nevertheless, man’s social vision transcends his 
social achievement. His reach exceeds his grasp; 
and he is still seeking out that form of social exist- 
ence which will meet his need and help him to his 
undiscovered goal. He apparently alone among 
animals reaches out for a social contact beyond his 
own immediate group; and he is continually push- 
ing onward the frontiers of the social unit. Why 
he has invariably failed in his effort to sustain the 
larger social units we shall inquire more particu- 
larly at a later stage. But there can be no question 
of the tendency toward the enlargement of the 
social group. In our day, owing to the new facili- 
ties of travel and communication, we have been 
able to conceive of a single social unit covering the 
whole earth. Nor is this conception a gratuitous 
and baseless fancy. It is simply the final term of 
the inherent logic of the human social instinct. 
Nor is it the size of the social unit only that has 
engaged his speculation and his experimentation. 
His literature of social organization is the measure 
of his preoccupation with the character of his 
society. 


6. THE SOcIAL BAsis oF EtHIcs. Most sig- 
nificant of all is the circumstance that the human 
test of behavior is its effect upon the group, that 
is to say, its social value. In the process of evolu- 
tion, it is probable that the criterion of the sound- 
ness or the error of a particular kind of behavior 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 35 


was its value for the survival of the species. An 
injurious mode of behavior was discarded; and 
behavior that ensured survival was preserved. To 
this the growth of “‘morals’’ bears a certain analogy. 
The social group has had increasing importance in 
the evolution of the higher forms of life; and in 
man all further progress appears to be linked up 
with the community. The community may have 
been in its origin only a successful experiment in 
the interests of survival; but it has been discovered 
to be the condition not of survival only but of 
the improvement and refinement of life. On this 
plane, therefore, those modes of behavior have 
survival-value which make specifically for the sur- 
vival and the strength of the group. At bottom, 
the difference between good and bad in human 
conduct is the difference between those types of 
conduct that make for the solidarity and strength 
of the group and those that hurt the group. Social 
behavior is righteousness; anti-social behavior is 
sin. If men are to live together in peace and to 
good purpose, there are certain things they must 
agree to do and others to abstain from doing. 
These limitations and accommodations are the 
mores of the group, the technique of conduct by 
which it secures its own survival. These agree- 
ments are subsequently systematized into codes of 
law. Generally, among primitive peoples, they 
were enforced by a system of taboos, and with the 
growth of culture they acquired strong religious 
sanctions. But their fundamental justification lay 
in their value for social survival. At bottom, what 
is morally right is that which makes for social sur- 


36 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


vival and vitality; what is morally wrong is that 
which enfeebles or destroys the social bond. The 
integrity of the group is the fountainhead of ethics. 

The fact that mankind has accepted a social 
valuation and criticism of conduct, has come to 
judge this type of behavior right and that wrong 
by its effect upon the life of the group, shows how 
deeply the social instinct is laid in his nature. In 
spite of the individual’s tendency, in pursuit of self- 
realization, to assert himself against the group, and 
in spite of his failure hitherto to evolve a form of 
social existence in which he may preserve his inde- 
pendence and live out his own life, it remains that 
he feels it in his bones that without a social life he 
must soon or late perish. 


7. THE BELOVED COMMUNITY. It would 
appear to be true that the main business of evolution 
on the human level so far as we have any knowl- 
edge of it has been the effort to create a form of 
social organization in which the individual can find 
himself at home, uncramped and unconfined—that 
is to say, to solve the problem of reconciling the 
individual’s desire for freedom with his need of 
society. During the whole period for which we 
have data, the purely physical changes in the human 
structure have been of a minor and unimportant 
character; and the recorded history of mankind 
may be interpreted as a journey in search of an 
adequate and fitting social life. That is why 
Utopia has so long and so persistently occupied 
the mind of men; and what has been called 
“utopian philosophy” is a reflection of the bio- 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 37 


logical urge toward a perfect society. It is inter- 
esting to recall how this form of social anticipation 
has gathered around Jerusalem. For this there is 
sufficient explanation in the New Testament ideali- 
zation of Jerusalem. In the main, the idealized 
Jerusalem of the Old Testament is the city itself, 
grown into the metropolis of a politico-religious 
empire, wide as the world, with Israel in the seats 
of the mighty, and the Gentile nations bringing to 
it humble and grateful tribute. In the New Testa- 
ment, Jerusalem is detached from time and place. 
It appears as “‘the Jerusalem which is above,’ which 
is free and is our mother, “‘the heavenly Jerusalem”’ 
and “‘the holy city, new Jerusalem,’’ which came 
down out of heaven from God. Thus it has come 
to pass that the ‘“‘New Jerusalem” has been the 
familiar name of the city of human dreams. When 
it has seemed to be in the high heavens, far removed 
from a perishing world, a St. Bernard sang of 
“Jerusalem the golden’; and when its fair walls 
have been descried rising upon the solid earth, its 
name was still “Nova Solyma,”’ as an unknown 
Puritan dreamer called it, or plain “Jerusalem,” 
after the fashion of William Blake who set about 
building it in ““England’s green and pleasant land.” 

It has had other names, to be sure. Plato called 
it the Republic, and St. Augustine The City of God. 
It was Utopia to Sir Thomas More and New 
Atlantis to Francis Bacon; Campanella called it 
The City of the Sun, and Samuel Butler called it 
Erewhon. But by what name soever it was called. 
it was a dream of that to which Josiah Royce has 
given the most beautiful of all its names, The 


38 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


Beloved Community.* Besides literature of an 
imaginative kind, there is a vast discursive literature 
of the Beloved Community. The student of Nevill 
Figgis will know how voluminous was the medie- 
val and post-medieval discussion of the City of God. 
The controversies of papalist and conciliarist were 
at bottom waged concerning the real nature of the 
ultimate human society. To this class belongs all 
the literature of social integration from Plato to 
Sidney Webb; and it is pertinent to observe that 
its catalogue includes entries that are classics in their 
own kind and have profoundly influenced for weal 
or woe the course of human affairs. Dante’s De 
Monatchia, Machiavelli's Il Principe, Milton's 
Areopagitica, Hobbes’ Leviathan, Bellers’ Colledge 
of Industry, Lamennais’ Paroles d’un Croyant, 
Mills’ Liberty—-to name but a few obvious 
instances—each in its own way and at its own 
angle is an endeavor to show the way to the 
ultimate society. 

This imaginative and intellectual quest of the 
New Jerusalem is an outworking of the biological 
need of an adequate and suitable social existence; 
and it is this same need that explains the long rest- 
lessness of the human race. We have gathered 
some evidence, here a little and there a little, of an 
ancient Wanderlust, long before the dawn of what 
we call history. Not enough indeed to tell a 
coherent tale, but enough to hint at what was going 
on in those dark hinterlands. There is something 
about the coming of the broad-headed man into 
Europe from Asia and his diffusion to the south 
and west, crowding his predecessor, the long-headed 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 39 


man, to the fringes of Europe. We trace another 
Asiatic immigration that left a trail of its speech as 
far west as Lapland and Finland. We infer a 
double Celtic invasion of Great Britain; and there 
was a migration of Franks into Gaul from what is 
now Northwestern Germany. So the story goes— 
a series of broken glimpses of a busy ‘‘coming and 
going” in those far-off days; and so it is to this day. 

In these latter days, the discovery of the New 
World opened up fresh fields to this restlessness. 
From Spain and France, from Holland and Britain 
and elsewhere, came a host of adventurers and 
colonists; and these, their successors, their children 
and children’s children have swept across the North 
American continent, redeeming its waste places, 
clearing its forests, making of it a home for a human 
society to its farthest coasts) And why? ‘The 
United States of America has been called “an 
experiment in democracy’’; but that is only to say 
that it is an attempt to realize the human dream of 
a perfect society. The French Revolution in its 
own day, and the Russian Revolution in ours, were 
attempts of the same kind. But it is plain as 
daylight that man has not found the society he is 
looking for. 

Perhaps this is the clue to history; and none has 
set it forth more nobly than the unknown writer 
of the Epistle to the Hebrews: 


These all died in faith, not having received 
the promises, but having seen and greeted them 
from afar; and having confessed that they 
were strangers and pilgrims on the earth, For 


40 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


they that say such things make it manifest 
that they are seeking after a country of their 
own. ... But now they desire a better coun- 
try, that is, an heaven-like; wherefor God is 
not ashamed of them to be called their God; 
for he hath prepared for them a city.’ 


Here surely is the key to the age-long human 
odyssey—this lure of a city of God, this ‘‘unappeas- 
able nostalgia for a beloved community’’; and Karl 
Marx’s economic interpretation of history is only 
a version of this amazing pilgrimage in terms of 
bread and cheese. 

But may it not all be a mirage of the desert? Is 
this long quest but a chasing of the rainbow? 

Some modern minds seem overshadowed by the 
presumed certainty of the final extinction of life 
on this planet. The solar system is cooling, its 
energy is running down; in course of time the 
earth will become uninhabitably cold. In that day 
there will be an empty planet, strewn with the 
memorials of a vanished race, a forsaken graveyard, 
unbroken by the sound of any living thing. 

In the telling of it, it sounds a dismal prospect. 
But we are not compelled to give it house-room in 
our minds. The certainty is no more than a specu- 
lation. Science may presently have another thought 
about it, as it has had about other confident predic- 
tions—the myth of a fated Progress, for instance. 
In any case, this desolation seems to be dated for a 
time so far off as to be inconceivable in our minds: 
and in the meantime many things may happen. We 
cannot tell what transformations and possibilities 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 41 


of life may be brought about by a sound social 
evolution and a thoroughgoing spiritual culture. 

There is, however, a nearer problem of some 
gravity, to wit: Will the “human experiment’ 
succeed on this planet? Now that we have dis- 
carded belief in a fated automatic progress, in the 
Spencerian ‘‘mighty movement,’’ it has become an 
open question whether the race will climb to the 
height of its possibility and do and behold those 
things that “‘prophets have spoken of and angels 
have desired to see.” Humanity has obviously the 
materials of growth and progress; it would appear 
that human nature possesses an incalculable store 
of unused reserves; but these reserve materials are 
useless without the will to grow. Can mankind 
evoke and sustain the will to further progress? If 
it cannot, then it will become extinct, and life will 
no doubt evolve some other form by which to reach 
its inscrutable goal. That would be no new thing. 
Life proceeds by ‘‘trial and error’; and some of 
its experiments have come to nothing. Perhaps 
humanity is the latest of its “‘errors,’’ and it too 
may have to be abandoned. It is not easy to con- 
cede the possibility of final human failure; but no 
candid mind finds the present state of the world 
reassuring. 

The peculiarity of man in the scheme of evolu- 
tion is that his destiny has been placed in his own 
hands. That is at once the consequence and the 
significance of his freedom; and however narrow 
his freedom may be, it is palpably wide enough to 
make it almost certain that all future advance 
depends on his will to advance. And the unanswer- 


42 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


able question that remains is whether man in the 
exercise of his freedom will give himself to the 
creation of the social existence which is essential 
to his own fulfilment, or will he go on grinding 
his own axe—every man for himself and the devil 
take the society? 

Be that as it may, human society is for the 
moment checked in its evolution; and it is necessary 
that we should consider some of the reasons for 
this arrest. 


8. SOCIETY AND THE STATE. The forms of 
human association are endless in their variety. 
F,. W. Maitland, speaking of ‘‘the structure of the 
groups in which men of English race have stood 
since the days when the revengeful kindred were 
pursuing the blood feud,’ gives an impressive 
catalogue: 


churches, and even the medieval church, one 
and catholic, religious houses, mendicant 
orders, nonconforming bodies, a presbyterian 
system, universities old and new, the village 
community, the manor in its growth and 
decay, the township, the new England town, 
the counties and hundreds, the chartered 
boroughs, the gild in all its manifold varie- 
ties, the inns of court, the merchant adven- 
turers, the militant “‘companies’ of English 
condottieri, who returning home help to make 
the word ‘“‘company’’ popular among us, the 
trading companies, the companies that became 
colonies, the companies that make war, the 
friendly societies, the trade unions, the clubs, 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 43 


the group that met at Lloyd’s Coffee House, 
the group that becomes the Stock Exchange, 
and so on even to the one-man company, the 
Standard Oil Trust, and the South Australian 


Statutes for communistic villages.°® 


This—a mere fraction of the whole story— 
shows how vital and flexible is the human capacity 
for association. Any common interest, however 
trivial, is sufficient to create a social group. Such 
sroups as these that Maitland enumerates are in 
the main formed by voluntary association; and he 
speaks of them in connection with the problem 
that is raised by their existence within those larger 
groups to which men belong by accident of birth 
or location—the commonwealth, the State and the 
nation. For a reason to be presently considered, the 
normal attitude of the larger group toward these 
lesser groups is one of suspicion or even of active 
hostility; and it has steadily affirmed that their 
right to exist is a concession of its own. ‘The 
motto of the absolute state,’’ as Maitland calls it, 
was the French declaration of August 18, 1792, 
which affirmed that the truly free State cannot 
suffer in its bosom any corporation, not even such 
as had deserved well of the country by its devotion 
to public instruction. For this reason a great deal 
of what has been called the struggle for liberty has 
been specifically the struggle for the liberty of the 
voluntary association. ‘The struggle for religious 
liberty in England has been colored throughout by 
its first phase, the fight for life which the early 
separatist communities had to make. ‘The principle 


44 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY, 


at issue was the right of free association, for the 
autonomy of the freely associated group, that is to 
say, for the liberty of the social impulse. In the 
early nineteenth century there is a striking instance 
of the hostility of the state to the voluntary group 
in the repressive legislation which was passed 
against private associations of employers and of 
workmen alike. It cannot be questioned that a 
part of the human failure to create a worthy social 
order is due to the still existing deadlock between 
the political unit and the voluntary group. In the 
measure that the political unit claims—as in theory 
it always does—an absolute authority over the life 
of its members, this deadlock will continue. As 
Mr. Cole has well put it: “the State even if it 
includes everybody is still only an association 
among others; because it cannot include the whole 
of anybody.’’*° The individual will be subject to 
the strain of a divided loyalty until we have 
achieved—if we can achieve—a modus vivendi 
between the political unit and the free groups in 
which the nonpolitical elements of the individual 
life embody and exercise themselves. 

The reason why the large political unit tends 
to check the luxuriance of the associative impulse 
may be summed up in the expression “‘biological 
pressure.”’ In an exhaustive study of the social 
formations of the Teutonic peoples, Mr. Edward 
Jenks discovers three types of groups." First comes 
the clan or the gentile formation, which is presently 
superseded by the state or the military formation; 
and he perceives the minute beginnings of a third 
type, partnership or the contractual formation. 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 45 


The clan is a social group which rests upon blood- 
kinship and is otherwise but loosely bound together. 
Before its members belong to the clan, they belong 
to the family or the household; and the clan is not 
able to act directly upon its constituent members. 
Where and so long as there is no great biological 
pressure, as in the vast spaces of ancient Germany 
and undiscovered America, the clan system has a 
chance of survival. But in the face of enemies it 
is always in danger. When natural increase and 
consequent biological pressure put the clan in 
jeopardy, out of its necessity arose the war-chief 
and his band, who are “‘the earliest form of the 
State.’ The new unit was an organization for 
power in the interest of survival; and in the com- 
petition between groups force was proved to con- 
stitute fitness to survive. Consequently the new 
institution had come to stay; and not only to stay 
but to expand. For size and power properly 
organized are in this region convertible terms. As 
out of the clan that became the first state, there 
grew the national state, so out of the national state 
have grown such vast aggregations as the British 
Empire and the United States of America. 


9. STATE AND EMPIRE. The State grew out 
of military necessity; but it found other fields in 
which it could exercise itself—so much so that the 
word omnicompetent has been used to describe its 
implicit doctrine of itself. The scope and variety 
of these activities have tended to hide its origin, and 
it is only in time of war that its essential character 
and the spirit of its organization become apparent. 


46 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


For the loose organization and the respect for the 
autonomy of its constituent groups that we find 
in the clan, the State substitutes the absolute and 
direct obedience of all its individual members to its 
acknowledged head. In war-time this leads to a 
regimentation as complete and as strict as ever; and 
it is only when the pressure of danger from without 
is relaxed that the more free and spontaneous 
groupings of men have any chance of effectual 
existence. So long as groups of men are exposed 
to the operation of natural selection, it is likely 
that the State will continue in something like its 
present form; but it will not be the only case in 
which a survival-device which proved to have value 
at one stage has become at another stage an obstruc- 
tion to further development. It is perfectly true 
that the original function of the State is held in 
abeyance during periods of peace; and in conse- 
quence it allows for those growths and variations 
that are characteristic of life; but so long as nations 
are subject to biological pressure, those growths 
are liable to arrest at any time. It would therefore 
appear that the elimination of war is a condition 
of the further evolution of mankind; and in that 
event the State would evolve into something of 
different nature. 

The case is not altered much when the “‘consti- 
tution” of the state is changed. The State, whether 
in an autocracy or in a democracy, will always tend 
to operate in the same way. Indeed, it is always 
possible for a democracy to regimentate its members 
more effectually than a despotism. ‘“The true 
democratic principle that none shall have power 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 47 


over the people is taken to mean,” says Lord Acton, 
“that none shall be able to restrain or to evade the 
power of the people. The true democratic prin- 
ciple that the people shall not be made to do what 
it does not like is taken to mean that it shall not be 
required to tolerate what it does not like. ‘The true 
democratic principle that every man’s free will shall 
be as unfettered as possible is taken to mean that 
the free will of the people shall be fettered in 
nothing.’’*? How true this may be is clear to any- 
one who observes the current reign of uniformi- 
tarianism in the United States of America. It is 
beyond doubt that this tendency is hostile to the 
continued development of mankind. In the course 
of evolution, we observe that life has provided for 
rich and luxuriant variation. Nothing is indeed so 
evident as the almost total absence of regimentation 
and mechanical uniformity in its display of types. 
However necessary for national defense a social 
organization capable of swift mobilization for war 
may be, biologically it will remain a constant 
obstacle to social evolution. The State as we know 
it is a conservative force, for while indeed it may 
conserve the group, it tends to conserve it in the 
same condition and at the same level, 
and makes difficult any further development. It 
represents the hive-type of human association. At 
this time of day, so far as the evolution of the race 
is concerned, the sovereign State is a biological carry- 
over which has largely ceased to serve a genuine 
biological purpose. 

The nation and the State are sometimes discussed 
as though they were identical. The State is the 


48 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


nation organized and functioning as a political 
unit—where the term political is used to cover the 
formal external relations and the internal peace of 
the national group. It is the organ by which the 
nation exercises its collective authority both without 
and within its own borders. From its very nature 
it tends to be exclusive, to emphasize and to per- 
petuate the identity of the group it speaks for over 
against other groups. But it is important to notice 
that there is nothing invincibly exclusive or neces- 
sarily self-regarding in the nation. ‘The nation 
is a group of people who live together in a society 
formed partly as the result, at first, of geographical 
or historical accident. By living together, working 
together and suffering together they have created 
a tradition, a national memory which binds them 
together by ties of sentiment far stronger than the 
physical ground or the political occasion of their 
community. It has been argued that the nation is 
the largest social group that the human mind at its 
present level can grasp. If this means that the 
nation represents the largest group within which 
the social instinct of the average man can and does 
function effectually, it is doubtless true. Indeed, 
it is too generous a measurement; for it is doubtful 
whether the ordinary man behaves with a true and 
authentic sociability outside his own class or caste. 
But if the statement means that the social vision and 
feeling of the individual is confined within the 
circle of the nation, it is palpably untrue. “In 
human society,’”’ says Trotter, “‘a man’s interest 
in his fellows is distributed about him concentri- 
cally, according to a compound of various relations 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 49 


they bear to him which we may call in a broad way 
sheer nearness.’’*® “Trotter goes on to show that 
there is a centrifugal fading of interest as it passes 
through the successive circles of his kinsfolk, his 
fellow townsmen, his fellow countrymen, his race, 
“until a limit is reached beyond which all interest 
is lost.’ But he points out how ‘‘freedom of travel 
and the development of the resources rendered avail- 
able by education’’ have increased the area of human 
acquaintanceship until there has grown “‘a sense 
of international justice, a vague feeling of being 
responsibly concerned in human affairs.” “The fact 
appears to be that the inherent logic of the social 
instinct compels it at last to embrace all mankind, 
and that the nation is a stage in the evolution of 
mankind by which the cave man is to grow at last 
into a citizen of the world. 

We have observed the biological tendency toward 
increase of size in multicellular organisms and in 
human societies; but the large human aggregations 
that have appeared in history have lacked stability 
and have disappeared. On one view, human his- 
tory may be regarded as the record of the rise and 
fall of Empires; and perhaps the final explanation 
of the instability of these large aggregations lies 
simply in the circumstance that they were Empires. 
Their cohesion was secured by pressure from with- 
out rather than from internal sociability; their 
unity was political rather than social. It is hardly 
too much to say that the turning point in the his- 
tory of the Roman Empire was reached when it 
abandoned its policy of toleration and substituted 
for it a rule of uniformity. Whatever “reason of 


50 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


State’ lay behind it, the institution of Caesar- 
worship was intended to “‘iron out’’ dissent; and 
the persecutions of Flavius, Diocletian and Decius 
were carried out in the interests of a close regimenta- 
tion of the human material of the Empire. We 
shall have occasion to see the same tendency in 
the history of the medieval Church, the tendency 
to impose the goose-step upon its members; and it 
seems almost beyond argument that this is a process 
which provokes its own nemesis. It is the impulse 
to turn a people into an army, to organize society 
for the sake of efficiency and power. ‘There are 
biological reasons for supposing that such a process 
is unfriendly to the advance of life. Professor J. 
A. Thomson quotes the paleontologist Marsh as 
saying “‘that the epitaph of the Iguanodon might 
be: ‘I and my race died of overspecialization;’ ”’ 
and he goes on to speak of “‘the graceful graptolites, 
the robust trilobites, the highly specialized euryp- 
toids, the great labyrinthodents, ichthyosaurs, ple- 
siosaurs, and the pterodactyls,’’ who died of the 
same disease.** High specialization must necessarily 
set a limit to the variety of reactions of which the 
organism might otherwise be capable; it is achieved 
at the expense of plasticity; and in a changing 
world a fixed organization is in danger of finding 
itself in situations with which it has forfeited the 
faculty of dealing. The close regimentation of 
human societies in the interests of ‘‘efficiency,”’ 
whether for survival or for aggression, or for 
material prosperity, must in the end have conse- 
quences not dissimilar. Human aggregations of 
the “‘empire’’ type are ill-fitted for survival; and 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY OL 


the stability of the British Empire to-day is noto- 
riously due to the degree in which it has departed 
from the traditional imperial type of organization 
and has become in the main a commonwealth of 
self-governing political units. It is not impertinent 
to point out, in further confirmation of this view, 
that the British Empire has been in recent years in 
danger of disruption just as those points at which 
the “imperial’’ idea has lingered on—in Ireland, 
Egypt and India; and the pacification of South 
Africa after the Boer War shows how much more 
effectual a principle of integration is the federal 
than the imperial. 

The Empire is a natural growth out of the State; 
the family-likeness is unmistakable. Both alike are 
achievements of power; and they live by a tech- 
nique of power. This is not to say that State and 
Empire have not had a part to play in the evolution 
of human society. At their own stage in the process 
they involved a discipline which was probably 
necessary to the survival of human society in the 
midst of anarchy. We shall have occasion to see 
how even the Church had to resort to something 
like a ‘‘State’’ organization and discipline in order 
to save the life of the spirit from the anarchy of 
the Dark Ages. But life has again and again dis- 
carded techniques and modes of behavior which 
had been found helpful at the earlier stages of its 
development; and when any form of life has clung 
too tenaciously to its survival devices, it has been 
left to stagnate or to perish. ‘The crustacean still 
remains in its crust; and the iguanodon is dead. In 
due time the State as we know it will become obso- 


52 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


lete as an instrument of survival and growth and 
may become the prison and even the grave of human 
society. If biological analogy is to be trusted, it is 
a passing and transitional stage in the progress of 
mankind. 


10. ‘THE REACTIONARY MIND. It would how- 
ever be idle to pretend that there are not powerful 
elements in human nature that seem to guarantee 
to the State a lease of life yet tolerably long. So 
long as men are still anarchic and only partially 
socialized, so long will dangers within and without 
argue with the ordinary man for the preservation 
of the military State. But there is also in human 
nature an inborn inertia which resists change. 
Inborn, for we may trace its origin to a far sub- 
human past. It may be indeed that we owe the 
whole vegetable kingdom to this inertia: and the 
evolution of the animal has been much retarded by 
its tendency to fall back into the vegetative life. 
However full, however overflowing the activity of 
an animal species may appear, “‘torpor and uncon- 
sciousness are always lying in wait for it.’’= There 
may be also a disinclination to leave the shelter to 
which life has reached and become habituated. 
Some habit or some armament has had a survival- 
value; and sometimes a species has preferred to leave 
well enough alone and to stay where it was rather 
than risk an adventure into the unknown. This 
is only to say that life is inherently conservative, 
but that it sometimes overdoes it—to its own loss. 
This is true also of man; he too is by nature con- 
servative; he too often overdoes it. 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 53, 


This conservatism in human nature is reinforced 
by the unshed inheritance of herd-mind. It has 
already been pointed out that, while the associative 
impulse runs through the whole of life, human 
society has tended toward a character different from 
other associations. For, elsewhere, the individual 
is merged in the group, whereas man is seemingly 
intended to become independent and autonomous, 
to live out his own life and to grow into a full and 
complete manhood. ‘The hive and the pack have 
but a single mind; man was meant to have a mind 
of his own: and his society was meant to leave him 
with an independent mind. But that independent 
mind the mass of men have not yet achieved; they 
still are subject to the law of the pack when they 
are not under the law of the hive. The old entail 
of herd-mind still clings, and at its worst becomes 
the mob-mind, that ugly and horrible thing which 
is indeed no mind at all, but a wild contagious 
impulse that puts the mind out of action. 

The psychology of the herd-mind in man has 
in recent years been ably discussed by a number of 
writers, and it need not now detain us. Every 
class and caste, every community and country has 
built for itself a house of life, has elaborated for 
itself a code of orthodoxies and habits, of familiar 
ideas and customs, within the pale of which the 
individual is at home. But let any new idea enter 
into this circle; immediately the community scents 
danger, feels its security imperiled, closes its ranks 
and is up in arms against the intruder. It will have 
nothing to do with it; it hurls hard and ugly names 
at it; it charges it with criminal intention; and as 


54 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY, 


often as not it kills the individual who imported it. 
That is the herd-mind at work; and the war period 
showed its survival in all the belligerent countries. 
It is the inevitable lot of the new idea that it is 
charged with affronting every kind of human sus- 
ceptibility and with endangering social security. In 
Jerusalem, Christianity was treated as an outrage 
upon religion; at Athens as an outrage upon philos- 
ophy; at Philippi, as an outrage upon patriotism.” 

The further progress of mankind is bound up 
with the liberation of the individual from the herd- 
mind; and for this we have to look chiefly to educa- 
tion. But if education is to give to men independent 
and self-directing minds and to equip them with a 
principle and faculty of valuation and criticism, 
its processes must be radically revised. However, 
we must be prepared to watch the herd-mind disap- 
pear very slowly. Nothing has in recent years so 
chilled the hope of rapid democratic progress as 
the discovery of the low average of intelligence in 
civilized communities. While the Binet tests are 
open to grave objection in many respects, it is 
probable that their general results give a rough 
approximation of the state of intelligence in a com- 
munity; and in England an investigation conducted 
by other methods gave results that correspond with 
the general impression left by the Binet tests in the 
American army, namely, that three-fourths of the 
people in an average community are a long distance 
away from the possession of a mental equipment 
that would make them capable of independent 
judgment and fruitful personal initiative. Our 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 55 


present education, both in its methods and its sub- 
ject matter, tends to indoctrinate immature minds 
with the orthodoxies of the herd and aggravates the 
social inertia which obstructs the continued evolu- 
tion of mankind. The herd perpetuates itself; and 
its success in doing so is a check upon all social and 
cultural progress. 

It should be added in any discussion of the 
influences that make for a static or reactionary 
condition of society that Law must be included 
among them. “It would appear that the force 
exercised by society through the medium of law is 
a wholly conservative force. It makes steadily for 
the maintenance of the existing order.’’’” Law is 
the definition of certain modes of conduct which 
experience has shown to be of advantage to the 
social group; and in its original intention it was 
intended to be no more than a declaration of exist- 
ing custom; but formal definition—whether in 
conduct or belief—tends to become authoritative 
and mandatory, and the Law comes to be clad with 
attributes first of majesty and finally of divinity. 
Law-abidingness becomes ‘‘the law and the proph- 
ets,’ and the gospel as well; and to transcend the 
Law is as grave an offense as to transgress it. “That 
is why the moral pioneer and the prophet have 
commonly been treated as criminals. Whatever 
moral sense a man may have is constrained to oper- 
ate in a mechanical stereotyped fashion within the 
prescribed limits. Its reactions to moral evil become 
conventional and formal; and its ideal is a stand- 
ardized goodness without independence and origin- 


56 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


ality. The total effect of law is to maintain the 
status quo; and the difficulty of bringing about a 
change in law is notorious. 


11. THE RADICAL MIND. Nevertheless, in 
spite of all conservative influences, human society 
does change; and its changes come very much as 
do the new beginnings that have been made in sub- 
human life. There is a breaking-away from ancient 
security, an adventuring-forth from trodden paths. 
In all life there is a pioneer instinct; and human 
society now and again brings forth out of its loins 
a pioneer-soul, a son whom it neither owns nor 
honors, until it has slain him. Mr. Trotter speaks 
of stable-minded and unstable-minded persons in 
society—a description somewhat overcomplimen- 
tary to the former and less than just to the latter. 
For it is the latter class that furnishes the pioneer, 
the inventor, the prophet, the rebel, the dissenter 
and the nonconformist, the people who have proved 
themselves the growing-points of society. Mr. 
Trotter is right in insisting that this class represents 
a specific human type. Some day perhaps a com- 
petent student will give us a scientific account of 
the rebel-psychology. That there is something 
typical about the mentality of the great rebels may 
be gathered from the comparative reading of a few 
biographies. All alike display an abnormal mental 
sensitiveness combined with great physical restless- 
ness, a keen craving for fellowship combined with 
a fondness for solitude and lonely meditation, a 
vivid perception of present evils together with a 
passion for a future that should restore some primi- 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 7, 


tive simplicity, a tendency once the first step in 
rebellion has been taken to extend the rebellious 
front to other issues, a frequent admixture of integ- 
rity of character with a certain irregularity of 
conduct. But the paradox of the rebel has always 
been that, while he has always been assailed as a 
subverter of the social order, his own driving force 
has been a social sense quicker and broader than that 
of his orthodox contemporaries. He attacks the 
existing social organization only to break down 
walls that excluded some class from its legitimate 
share of what is going on in life. He hears the call 
of the disinhesited, and he seeks to lead them into 
the heritage of opportunity of which they are 
cheated by the cunning and the cupidity of the 
great. He endeavors to push out the frontiers of 
privilege in order that the poor and the outcast 
may enter upon a larger life. Indeed, it may be 
said that the whole historical struggle for freedom 
has been a struggle to broaden the basis of fellow- 
ship. Mr. Wells has lately said that “from the first 
dawn of the human story,’’ mankind has been 
“‘pursuing the frontiers of its possible community.” 
But the prime agent of this pursuit has been the 
dissenter. Dissent has again and again proved itself 
to be the social growing-point. Yet the dissenter 
has usually been shot at dawn or hanged. We shall 
not have achieved a genuine freedom or the condi- 
tion of a pacific and steady social evolution until 
we have at least reached a state of society in which 
there will be not only a generous toleration, but 
a serious encouragement of dissenting thought. 
Meantime, the dissenter must be regarded as a bio- 


58 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


logical thrust; and historically we are justified in 
regarding him generally as a thrust in the direction 
of a more humane social form. This accords well 
with the view, already affirmed, that at the present 
stage the impulse of life is directed toward the 
evolution of the appropriate and adequate human © 
community. | 

The effort to maintain a static condition of 
society is foredoomed to failure. The impulse of 
life cannot be suppressed or stereotyped: and the 
past history of human societies and their present 
problem lie chiefly in the inherent conflict between 
the conservative and the creative elements within 
life itself. If some sort of modus operandi could 
be devised which would enable these conflicting 
elements to discharge their proper function without 
involving life in a perpetual civil war, we should 
have struck the elusive trail which leads to our social 
goal. For it is not to be denied that the conserva- 
tive instinct has an important role to discharge in 
evolution; and especially on the human plane where 
independence is apt to breed anarchy, and freedom 
to bring forth folly, a possibility always at our 
doors so long as we suffer from inadequate knowl- 
edge and defective wisdom. Where conservatism 
is disinterested caution, it is then an indispensable 
factor in social advance. Unfortunately, however, 
conservatism is rarely of that kind, but is for the 
most part a selfish conviction in favor of the status 
quo. It is notorious that political conservatism is 
the monopoly of the privileged classes, who are, no 
doubt, sincerely persuaded that their advantage is 
the advantage of the whole. But even a selfish 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 59 


conservatism—in the absence of a conservatism of 
disinterested caution—serves to countervail hasti- 
ness and impulsiveness of change. Selfish conserva- 
tism is, however, all too ready to step into militant 
reaction, which in its turn provokes militant 
radicalism—so that the train is ready laid for 
revolution. 

Now, the favorite weapon of militant reaction 
is the suppression of dissenting opinion by means 
of espionage, censorship and such judicial procedure 
as may be available; and it can always succeed in 
mobilizing the popular herd-mind by raising the 
cry of ‘‘danger to the State,” so that it can count 
generally upon adequate public support. Now, it 
is no doubt true that many new ideas may be dan- 
gerous to the community; but before they can be 
dangerous there must be conditions of distress or 
hardship in the community to which the new idea 
can make an appeal. Revolutionary propaganda 
can gain no hearing except where there is discon- 
tent. Butin any case there is no surer way to secure 
currency for a new idea than by the forcible sup- 
pression of it, which not only advertises it but 
increases its dangerous quality by driving it under- 
ground. Of the ultimate consequences of this 
policy we have enough historical evidence to leave 
us in no doubt. 

For force provokes force; and they that take the 
sword perish by the sword. A revolution carried 
through by force must live by force. It has to 
maintain itself by ruthlessness and terrorism. But 
the actual effect of revolution is to create a new 


60 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


type of privilege and a new class to enjoy it. The 
aristocratic privilege which the French Revolution 
destroyed made way for the economic ascendancy 
of the bourgeoisie; and the economic privilege of 
the middle classes is seriously affected by the shock 
it received in the Russian Revolution, which already 
seems to have produced:a privileged class of prole- 
tarian bureaucrats. The tables have been turned; 
power has changed hands; there are new top-dogs 
for old; the poison has been redistributed. There 
has been a fresh deal of the cards, but it is still the 
same old pack. Just as upon the institution of 
War, so upon the principle and method of Revolu- 
tion there is written plainly, so that he who runs 
may read, the legend ‘‘No thoroughfare.’ Assur- 
edly here is no road of assured social progress, 

It is indeed true that at the worst the principle 
which has supplied a reason and a driving force to 
revolution gets soon or late inserted into the social 
technique of a people; but there are nevertheless 
grounds for the belief that, though revolution 
seems to be the short cut, it is actually the longest 
way to the goal. There is wisdom and truth in 
Mr. Sidney Webb’s aphorism that “nothing sudden 
is revolutionary; and nothing revolutionary is ever 
sudden.’ And for the biologist this needs no dem- 
onstration. Meantime, a reign of toleration seems 
to be the first condition of a pacific and steady social 
progress. So far from clapping the innovator in 
prison, let the new thing be brought into the Agora 
where it can run the gauntlet of valuation and 
criticism; and it should not be beyond human wit 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 61 


to devise the means by which whatever truth the 
new idea contains may be peacefully and securely 
integrated into the social technique. 


12. THE EcONoMIcC MoTIvE. Nevertheless, it 
is doubtful whether we shall achieve a state of 
toleration until we have become agreed concerning 
the ends of life. As things are, we are governed 
in our social outlook by the group of human 
interests which we gather up under the label 
“economic’; and in the modern world we are 
chiefly concerned about the production and the 
distribution of wealth. “The wars of prehistoric 
men were caused by “biological pressure,’’ which 
simply meant a problem of food-supply; and while 
we may deny Karl Marx’s economic interpretation 
its claim to be regarded as the only clue to history, 
it has to be regarded as one of the most important 
clues. “To a vastly greater extent than any of us 
supposes, our public affairs are at bottom governed 
by the problems of food, clothing, shelter, heat, 
light and the like, with their derivative interests 
such as property, wages, employment. The main 
difference between the greater political parties in 
Great Britain and North America gathers around 
protective tariffs. “The saying that ‘‘trade follows 
the flag’ suggests what is undoubtedly true, that 
the motive of imperialism is markets. Our common 
discourse upon our public social concerns is devoted 
largely to considerations of material prosperity. 
Our navies are built for a commercial purpose— 
that of safeguarding commerce at sea. The primary 
social purpose of commerce is frustrated by the 


62 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


motive of private acquisition of wealth—whether 
in the form of profits or of wages. Virtually all 
our social troubles to-day spring out of economic 
discontent. 

But it is not at all likely that we shall achieve 
toleration until man has overcome his self-regarding 
motive. This observation is admittedly among 
the tritest; but it remains true, however trite. So 
long as the individual conceives of his own private 
advantage as an end and orders his life accordingly, 
so long will massed self-regard in the form of vested 
interests hold up the traffic of social evolution. The 
orthodoxies and conventions which hold the exist- 
ing order together will be defended to the last ditch. 
But it is also to be observed that self-regard in the 
main concerns itself with certain material ends and 
in particular busies itself with the acquisition of 
wealth and whatever wealth can buy. Hence arises 
the undue importance laid upon the processes of 
wealth-production and wealth-acquisition. And 
the main trouble and tragedy of contemporary 
society is that its processes are governed chiefly by 
the requirements of commerce. 

I am not here concerned with the economics of 
a commercial civilization: I only wish to point out 
the obstacles that are cast in the way of the evolu- 
tion of a rational and fully human society by the 
ascendancy of what we have learned to call the 
economic motive—which is simply the desire to 
acquire pecuniary wealth. It is of course true that 
the mere possession of money cannot be an end 
for any save a disordered mind; money is desired 
because it is a means of power or of pleasure or of 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 63; 


some other form of self-indulgence. To this an 
exception must be made of rare cases where money 
is desired and used for philanthropic purposes. By 
and large, money is sought for uses of personal self- 
gratification. And the processes of society as a 
whole are directed to the acquisition of pecuniary 
wealth, whatever the individual may do with the 
wealth. Industry and commerce have the right of 
Way. 

It would, of course, be foolish to suggest that 
modern society alone has had its processes governed 
and controlled by the economic motive. But while 
the production and distribution of a sufficiency of 
food, clothing, shelter and the like have always been 
social concerns and have so far governed the social 
processes of a community, in our time these same 
processes are directed toward the production of 
superfluity for the sake of pecuniary wealth. The 
original social purpose of industry and commerce 
has been overlaid by the motive of private gain; 
and so far from commerce and industry serving 
society, society to-day serves them. Outside what 
has been called ‘‘the leisure class,’’ men live in order 
to manufacture and sell; and they manufacture and 
sell in order to live; and the great part of life is 
spent in this rather fruitless circle. To be sure, 
there are goods of another nature which we may 
pick up by the way. We fall in love and marry; 
we build us houses and beget children; and we have 
our favorite diversions in which we seek occasional 
escape from the monotony of the economic routine. 
But these are largely footnotes or postscripts to the 
main business of life, which is commerce; and we 


64 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


are all involved in it—having to “make a living”’ 
and hoping to make a fortune. 

This subordination of the common life to 
wealth-production necessarily keeps society rotating 
around a fixed center—in motion but not moving; 
and social progress will remain an empty hope so 
long as society is so governed and organized that 
it is forever making material wealth its immediate 
goal. Even the most violent critics of the existing 
social order offer us no real escape from this cul de 
sac. The communist agrees with the capitalist upon 
the primacy of wealth; they disagree only about 
the present methods of its production and especially 
its distribution. They represent hostile sects within 
the same church—the church that worships ‘“‘this 
world’s unspiritual god.”’ 

There is as we have observed no stopping-place 
in wealth; and its sequel is in the main a reign of 
self-indulgence. Self-indulgence would appear to 
be a peculiarly human characteristic; in the sub- 
human world it seems not to exist. “The acquisition 
of freedom and intelligence by man involved the 
risk that he might use them for his own ends rather 
than for their appointed end, which is the continued 
evolution of life. Self-indulgence simply means 
that a man makes of himself an obstruction to the 
traffic of life, a dead end, a blind alley; and the 
penalty that he pays is degeneracy. Because we can 
perceive no end beyond ourselves, we naturally turn 
in upon ourselves and indulge ourselves in whatever 
form of self-gratification makes most effectual 
appeal to us. Nor is it the possessor of wealth only 
who is exposed to the habit of self-indulgence. He 


MAN AND HIS SOCIETY 65 


may set the pace; and his poorer neighbor does his 
best to keep up with him. It seems to be the logical 
end of a way of life which descries no goal for its 
effort beyond the acquisition of material and tem- 
poral good. For man cannot be satisfied with the 
possession of wealth; and seeing no other end upon 
which he may spend his superfluous money, he 
spends it upon himself—to minister to his vanity, 
to gratify his senses, to escape from his ennui. The 
modern consequence is the wide commercialization 
of pleasure, of sport and of vice, in order to meet 
the unsatisfied hunger of life in a materialistic 
society. 

The survival of power as a regulative idea of 
social organization, the atavistic faith in force; the 
strength of the herd mind, intolerance and the sup- 
pression of dissent, the organization of self-regard 
unto “‘vested interests,” the domination of the 
community by the ideology and technique of 
wealth-acquisition, self-indulgence—these things 
and their like are they which to-day constitute the 
drag upon social evolution. 

And thus it seems ever to have been. Man and 
his society appear to be caught in a net of frustra- 
tion. Civilizations, states, empires rise and pass 
away, describing monotonously the same curve of 
change from their beginning to their fall; and that 
ultimate human society, which is removed equally 
from the herd and from the hive, is yet to seek. 
Mr. Bertrand Russell has said truly that the two 
forces that determine the distribution of power 
among nations are cupidity and fear; and Dr. Jacks 
commenting upon this statement adds: “In every 


66 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


atrangement of power this formula repeats itself; 
the final arrangement like the present one being 
only the old farce of cupidity and fear performed 
by new actors.’’** ‘“The world,’’ said Newman, 


“‘has cycles in its course, 
That once has been is acted o’er again, 
Not by some fated law that need appal 
Our faith or binds our deed as with a chain, 
But by men’s separate sins, which blended, still 
The same bad round fulfil.” 


Perhaps it was some sense of this frustration that 
led St. Paul to say that the creation was “‘subjected 
to vanity,’’ doomed to futility, as it were rotating 
around an immovable axis, in unstaying movement, 
yet ending where it began. Yet St. Paul recognized 
that out of sight this same creation was straining 
toward “‘the liberty of the glory of the children of 
God.’”’ Indeed, it was his profoundest conviction 
that “‘the same bad round” in which the world 
seemed to be prisoned had already been broken. 


PART II 
THE NEW MAN AND THE NEW SOCIETY 


1. MAN AND RELIGION. So far, on the plane 
of nature, man has failed to create a society in which 
he can fully be himself; and on the face of it, after 
so long a failure, a certain misgiving concerning 
his future may be justified. If indeed men are 
incorrigibly vicious and self-regarding, there is no 
hope of a City of God; and it has been the fashion 
in recent times to suppose that the struggle for 
existence must continue on the human plane and 
that therefore the only thing that it is safe to assume 
concerning men is that they will naturally pursue 
a course of self-interest. We have had occasion 
already to see that the struggle for existence is not 
the only factor in the evolution of life and that 
there are impulses of association and codperation 
active on every level of life. But there is, moreover, 
some ground for supposing that the anarchic indi- 
vidualism which has characterized historical man 
is in some way a “‘fall’’ from what appears to have 
been the state of more primitive man. It has been 
our custom to regard the “‘cave man’”’ as the symbol 
of human brutality, and he is usually depicted 
belaying his wife or his neighbor with a club; and 
when we have desired to characterize some unusual 
cruelty, we have been as likely as not to drag in 
an allusion to the Old Stone Age. But as Mr. 
Chesterton has pointed out, the one fact that we 

67, 


68 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


do certainly know about the cave man is that he 
drew some very remarkable pictures on the walls 
of his cave; and it is necessary to point out that 
this was a brand new thing in the world; the animal 
had turned artist. “That was the real debut of man. 
As for the men of the Old Stone Age, it appears 
that, whatever else they may have left behind them, 
they did not leave any weapons for combat, and 
that we may even look back to a golden age of 
peace, when violence was practically absent from 
human relations.” Moreover, students of cultural 
anthropology incline to the view that there was in 
primitive mankind a more powerful social intuition 
and a deeper sense of social obligation*® than has ever 
been evident in what we are pleased to call civiliza- 
tion. ‘The doctrine of the Fall may be on the way 
to a scientific rehabilitation. 

Be that as it may, we know concerning human 
nature that it is not satisfied with itself and that it 
is forever trying to rise above itself. It has been 
said that table manners are a set of devices by which 
we try to hide the fact that a number of animals 
are feeding together. This is a whimsical way of 
speaking of a certain innate impulse toward refine- 
ment of nature that is evident in mankind at its 
best. But man’s face has been turned from the clod 
in more important ways. 

Professor Dewey says somewhere that the end 
of education is more education; and similarly we 
may say that the end of life is more life. But this 
does not mean mere continuance and extension of 
life, but the refinement and improvement of life. 
‘The end of life is finer life. If it were merely a 


NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 69 


matter of survival, our problem would resolve 
itself into an affair of bread and cheese; if it were 
a matter of happiness, we should want more than 
bread and cheese, but the remainder of the needful 
provender should be readily got at. But if we are 
to accept the moral of biological evolution, we must 
at least say that the end of human life is the produc- 
tion of a nobler, finer, more sensitive form of life. 
That this is a latent tendency in mankind is evident 
from its continuous effort to transcend its physical 
environment and to create for itself other worlds 
in which its finer ingredients might have the oppor- 
tunity to grow. 

Out of the world of things in which he found 
himself, man has created a new unseen world of 
ideas. And out of his world of ideas, he has built 
a world of values. From which it is very evident 
that he is consciously concerned with his future. 
We dramatize our “‘values’’ into ideals; and an 
ideal is a picture of some desired future; it is life 
projecting itself beyond the existing fact. 

It would take us too far afield to consider the 
travail of mind that made the discovery of the 
“ultimate values,’’ the good, the true, the beautiful. 
It is necessary, however, to set it down here as a 
significant fact in the story of man’s effort to rise 
above himself. Nevertheless, it is germane to our 
purpose to observe, first, that this definition is his- 
torically of very long standing and it still holds the 
field. It registers an advance from which there has 
been no recession. Second, it is to be regarded as 
the result of a speculative effort to descry the ends 
of life. Third, it is significant that these “ultimate 


70 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY, 


values’ are of a kind accessible only to the disin- 
terested. Here if a man would gain his life, he must 
lose it. “The good, the true, the beautiful are to be 
attained only by those who seek them for their 
own sakes and for no private end; and self-renun- 
ciation becomes the law and the prophets. The 
“ultimate values’’ that man has defined for himself 
are such as he must (so to speak) leave himself 
behind in order to reach. Fourth, these “ultimate 
values’’ are to be taken as recording life’s own 
discovery of the direction of its further evolution. 

But the most manifest of all the endeavors of 
man to transcend himself and his immediate envi- 
ronment has been that long, various, persistent 
aspiration that we call religion. However lowly 
the origins of religion may be, it is at bottom the 
product of an instinctive feeling that the horizons 
of sense do not fix the boundaries of life. Funda- 
mentally religion is the expression of man’s concern 
with the unknown. As soon as it dawned upon 
him that there may be being beyond the range of 
his senses, he began to be religious. For he began, 
however crudely and ignorantly, to try to establish 
some kind of “‘entente’’ with the unknown, the 
dim and mysterious environment which was hidden 
from his senses and withdrawn from his sure 
knowledge. It may be true that, having come up 
out of the brute with an inheritance of ancestral 
suffering and ancient fear, he surmised that the 
unknown might be peopled with enemies that had 
to be placated. But he became persuaded that his 
own destiny was in some way related to whatever 
lay within the unknown. His religion became an 


NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY, 71 


expression of his passion for survival, as indeed 
in its cruder forms it is to-day. [he popular con- 
ception of salvation still preserves this early instinct 
of self-preservation. Religion originated as a bio- 
logical function; and rightly understood, it serves 
the same purpose still. It holds out before life its 
transcendental end and inspires it to pursue that 
end. 

In The Legends of Smokeover Dr. Jacks describes 
the evolution of a great agency for redeeming the 
world out of the grubby and not overcleanly soil 
of the show-grounds at English fairs. It is the 
story of the growth of the sporting instinct from 
its lowest and dingiest levels into a constructive 
faith, and its consecration to the highest conceivable 
ends. This is a true parable of the way in which 
life has traveled. In its primal wilderness it put 
forth little struggling ill-shapen shoots of aspira- 
tion, of awe, of wonder; and these have by some 
incredible, continuous miracle grown into great 
trees that give both fruit and shade to the children 
of men. That is essentially the story of religion; 
and because it has brought to us and established in 
us a sense of the transcendental end of life, it has 
also set us on the road to the revaluation of life as 
it is. 

This is seen in the growth of the conception of 
the “holy.”4 The “holy” in its origin was the 
thing that was supposed to have some special rela- 
tion to the Unknown. It appeared in the crude 
taboos of primitive society; then came sacred 
animals, sacred places, sacred times, sacred persons; 
and it has brought forth the classic division of life 


72 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


into sacred and secular which overshadows us 
to-day. The movement, however, is still going 
on. ‘The area of the sacred has been steadily grow- 
ing; and Christianity has laid down the principle 
that all life is holy ground. The Church was 
eatly taught that there was nothing common or 
unclean—no easy lesson. for men cradled in the 
conviction that they belonged to an elect nation 
and that the gentile world lay outside the pale. 
‘They had their holy places; but they learned that 
God was to be found wheresoever there are those 
who seek Him in spirit and in truth. They had 
had their holy days; but they were taught to regard 
every day as holy. ‘They had had a holy caste of 
priesthood; but they came to see that every believ- 
ing soul was a priest of God. This yeast has gone 
on working in many ways. The ancient belief in 
the actual divinity of kings has been displaced by 
a more rational belief in the potential divinity of 
men. We have here an important—perhaps the 
most important—movement in the later evolution 
of life. First a tiny cleansing in the wilderness: 
now a promise that all the wilderness may be turned 
into holy ground. And indeed, not only are we 
on the way to the consecration of all life, that is, 
on the way to regarding it and treating it as dedicate 
to God; but our sacraments are meant to teach us 
that life itself is sacramental, that is to say, that 
it is a revelation of God itself, a manifestation of 
ultimate Reality. 

Probably it is here that we have to find the real 
differentia of mankind. Whatever of his endow- 
ment man may share with his lowlier kin, this 


NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 73 


religious aspiration seems to be a thing peculiarly 
his own. Prayer, which is the characteristic and 
fundamental expression of religion, is simply the 
restless aspiration of life toward the unseen. Faith 
is the conscious form of the impulse with which 
life from its first beginnings has faced the unknown; 
but the fact that it has become a conscious thing in 
man has given the unknown a new character. For 
man, it is something to be sought, a world to be 
explored; and the quest and exploration of the 
unseen supplies the momentum and determines the 
subject matter of religion. 

For the moment, we are concerned only with the 
biological aspect of religion. It is not to be sup- 
posed, however, that this exhausts the significance 
of religion. The religious man does not conceive 
of religion merely as the thrust of life into the 
unknown: he believes that the Unknown comes 
to meet him—in revelation. Moreover, it should 
be observed that the great religions of the world 
are less obviously concerned with a process of evo- 
lution than with the pressing business of redemp- 
tion. This does not conflict with our thesis; for 
redemption is the task of restoring a miscarried and 
frustrated process to its true original course. “These 
are matters which cannot be treated at this point. 
For our precent purpose, it is necessary only to 
insist upon religion as recording man’s sense of a 
destiny within the unknown and his effort to win 
into the unknown. It is the present phase of the 
odyssey of life toward its inscrutable goal.® 

But it has this special significance for the present 
discussion, that it sets before man an other-worldly 


74 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


end. We have seen that man’s failure to achieve 
an adequate social life has resulted chiefly from his 
preoccupation with and his domination by ‘‘this 
world’s unspiritual god.’’ His own growth is 
arrested by his worldly-mindedness; he is impris- 
oned in a material-temporal order. We have seen 
moreover that his own speculation concerning life 
has shown him that his end lies by way of values 
which are not market-values—things to be bought 
“without money and without price’’—an intima- 
tion clear enough that his further advances must 
be of a spiritual kind. ‘To this, religion, the intui- 
tion of “other-worldliness,’” adds the conviction 
that there is a new world of life to be entered and 
conquered, and in that new world a new quality 
of life and experience—some new ‘‘emergent”’ 
character—to be realized. In contrast with the 
world of sense, this new world is called the world of 
spirit, and it is to be attained by the present accep- 
tance and practice of a spiritual evaluation of life. 
If religion then is in line with the whole evolution 
of life, it should hold the promise of a new kind of 
man and of a new kind of society. 

It would be a story too long to tell here how the 
mind of man came slowly to conceive of the 
Unknown as a unity and to believe that it was a 
unity because it was indwelt by a personal being. 
‘That—the achievement of monotheism—is one of 
the great landmarks in the human pilgrimage; and 
it brought to religion a definiteness and a resolution 
which could not be induced by the attraction of an 
indefinite Unknown. Probably there has been no 
greater incentive to fine and disinterested human 


NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 75 


endeavor than the motive that our fathers knew 
as ‘‘the glory of God’; and some such motive we 
too must have—by whatever name we may call 
it—if the forward movement of life is to continue. 
Only so shall there be borne a race of men like gods 
and a society which finds its sanction, its interests 
and its cohesion in a common devotion to God.° 


2. THE Goop News. At any time during the 
reign of the Emperor Claudius, a traveler in the 
Eastern Empire might have met—either on the 
great imperial highroads or in the cities of Asia 
Minor and Greece—a Jew who was gaining con- 
siderable publicity by proclaiming wherever he 
could get a hearing that God had recently given 
the human race a new start, and that it was God's 
purpose to create a new human commonwealth, 
wide as the world, in which all the existing distinc- 
‘ tions of race and class would vanish, and which 
would be held together by a cohesive principle 
different from that of any known political society.’ 
The second part of the preaching fell upon ears 
familiar with the idea, for the Stoics had taught 
something like it: and the first part fell upon many 
ears that were famishing for some such news. 

As for the preacher himself, he was wholly sure 
that the world he was acquainted with needed a 
new beginning very badly. Being a religious Jew, 
he saw that world with the eye of a moralist; and 
the report which he gives of it is one of the gravest 
indictments of a civilization that has ever been 
set down in writing. It is not long, but it would 
be difficult to add anything to it; and the sum of 


76 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


the matter is that it was a world given over ‘“‘to a 
reprobate mind.’’ It was a moral cesspool. Like 
all wholesale indictments, it is subject to qualifica- 
tions and exceptions; but there is some contempo- 
rary evidence in support of the preacher’s strong 
language. ‘There is, moreover, evidence that goes 
to show that that world was intellectually decadent 
and bankrupt in religion. Yet it was a world 
spiritually hungry; and there was abroad a longing 
and a searching for tidings of salvation from what- 
soever quarter they might come.® 

The preaching carried conviction to many who 
heard it. Small groups of men and women, usually 
of the “‘lower’’ class, were gathered together on 
the strength of this hope in many of the cities of 
the Empire; and in these groups the preacher pro- 
fessed to find the beginnings of that divine com- 
monwealth of which he so confidently spoke. 
‘These people displayed some peculiarities which did | 
indeed suggest that they were an unusual human 
type. An unknown writer at a later time said 
that they 


were not distinguishable from the rest of 
mankind in land or speech or customs; they 
inhabit no special cities of their own, nor do 
they use any different form of speech, nor do 
they cultivate any out-of-the-way life . 

but while they live in Greek and barbarian 
cities as their lot may be cast and follow local 
customs in dress and food and life generally, 
yet they live in their own countries as sojourn- 
ers; they take part in everything as citizens 


NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY hs 


and submit to everything as strangers. Every 
strange land is native to them, and every 
native land is strange. “They marry and have 
children and like everyone else, but they do 
not expose their children; they have meals in 
common, but not wives. ‘They are in the 
flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. 
They continue on earth, but their citizenship 
is in heaven. They obey the laws ordained; 
and by their private lives they overcome the 
laws ...in a word, what the soul is to the 
body, that is what Christians are in the world.°® 


This description we may set down as somewhat 
excessive in its generosity; we know that there were 
those in the early churches who hardly justify this 
picture. But this was what they were meant and 
wanted to be like; and what very many did in 
truth become. 

And these were the people who were “‘the house- 
hold of God” and were to grow “unto a holy 
temple in the Lord”, of which temple, one Jesus 
was ‘‘the chief cornerstone’; and says our preacher, 
“other foundation can no man lay save than that 
which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” “This Jesus, 
who was the heart of the “‘good news,”’ the person 
in whom God had given the race a new beginning, 
and the one foundation of the divine common- 
wealth that was to come, had been crucified at 
Jerusalem some twenty years before. 

On the face of it, this preaching seems so pre- 
posterous that it is no wonder that the educated 
public thought it a little more than a bad joke. 


78 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


They said outright that it was folly; but our 
preacher had he known a Greek equivalent for the 
proverb would have said in the face of their 
laughter that “‘he laughs best who laughs last.”’ 


3. THE NEW VARIATION.” Nietzsche has 
familiarized this generation with a doctrine of the 
superman, a being who shall be as much in advance 
upon man as man is upon the higher primates. 
But St. Paul had anticipated Nietzsche; and he 
afirmed, moreover, that the first superman had 
already appeared. He found in Jesus the embodi- 
ment and the anticipation of a new humanity. We 
are to “‘come unto a full-grown man of the measure 
of the stature of the fullness of Christ’’; and Jesus 
is appointed to be “‘the first-born among many 
brethren.”’ Jesus is the disclosure of the human 
future: he is the true superman, the man-beyond- 
man who is to come. Plainly St. Paul descried 
(and not he alone) an ultra~-human quality in 
Jesus; and this same impression accounts for the 
traditional Christian attitude to Jesus. He was 
human-plus, and in that plus St. Paul found 
divinity. He saw the “‘light of the knowledge of 
the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’’ To 
St. Paul, Jesus was not only the anticipation of 
the human future, but the revelation of the divine 
nature. 

How far such a view of Jesus may be maintained 
out of the scanty records which we have of his 
life is a question which must be for the moment 
deferred. What cannot be questioned is that the 
main Christian tradition has accepted the Pauline 


NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 79 


view, and that undeniable and important historical 
consequences have come from it, To deny the 
Pauline view on a priori grounds is possible only 
to those who regard nature as a closed system, 
having reached its final term in man. The logic 
of evolution not only allows but requires us to 
anticipate a superman; and inasmuch as on the 
physical side there appears to have been no impor- 
tant structural modifications in man within any 
time of which we have knowledge, we are com- 
pelled to conceive of any possible supermanhood 
as being of a “‘spiritual’’ sort. And from the nature 
of the case, the superman will be a fresh revelation 
of God who is ‘‘a self-determining principle which 
manifests itself in a development which includes 
nature and man,’”’ and whatever may lie beyond 
man. And who will say that the anticipation of 
the human future and the revelation of the divine 
nature may not be at bottom the same thing? There 
is a modern philosophy which holds that the whole 
universe is tending toward deity. 


Within the all-embracing stuff of Space- 
Time, the universe exhibits an emergence in 
time of successive levels of finite existences, 
each with its characteristic empirical quality: 
the highest of these empirical qualities known 
to us is mind or consciousness. . . . Deity is 
thus the next higher empirical quality to mind. 
which the universe is engaged in bringing to 
birth. That the Universe is pregnant with 
that quality we are speculatively assured. 
What that quality is we cannot know; for we 


80 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


can neither enjoy nor still less contemplate it. 
Our human altars still are raised to the 
unknown God. If we could know what deity 
is, how it feels to be divine, we should first 
have to become as gods,** 


I cannot persuade myself that there is here a final 
accounting of the mystery of things; but something 
like it must needs be thought if we are to have a 
coherent view of a universe in process, and it cer- 
tainly tallies well with that part of the process that 
lies within our range. It was a thought akin to 
this that found expression in St. Paul’s picture of 
the creation groaning and travailing in pain while 
waiting to be delivered into the liberty of the glory 
of the children of God. 

If St. Paul had been living to-day, he would 
probably have said that in Jesus had appeared a 
new “‘emergent’’ in the human species. He would 
have shown that there were premonitions of the 
new thing in the Old Testament Scriptures, but in 
Jesus, it is present substantially and uniquely. The 
name which he gives to this new quality of life is 
“spirit.”” Throughout his writings the spirit is 
steadily regarded as describing a new plane and 
power of life; it is the cause and the content of the 
supernatural dimension of life, involving a super- 
natural understanding, a supernatural strength of 
life and immortality. The spirit makes us sons of 
God and joint heirs with Christ; and of those v-ho 
have risen to this plane, the destiny is “‘to be con- 
formed to the image of the Son, that he might be 
the first-born among many brethren.’’ The antithe- 


NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 81 


sis of flesh and spirit clearly corresponds to that of 
nature and supernature; and while Adam is the 
symbol of the former, Jesus is the symbol of the 
latter. ““The first man Adam was made a living 
soul; the last Adam a life-giving spirit.’’ There is 
a plane and a succession of nature of which Adam 
is the origin and the archetype: there is a plane and 
a succession of spirit of which Jesus is at once the 
beginning and theend. The spirit is called indiffer- 
ently the spirit of God and the spirit of Christ. 
Elsewhere the spirit is spoken of as the organ of 
God’s self-knowledge. The conceptions dissolve 
into each other; but it is clear that spirit represents 
the strain of deity which is common to God and 
Christ, and of which man is capable. In Jesus, 
manhood is joined to deity; and in Him God was 
starting a new race. 


4. THE NEw MAN AND THE NEw SOCIETY. 
Jesus had set Himself out to win His people into 
the Kingdom of God in the hope and expectation 
that they would become its heralds in the world. 
In this enterprise He failed; His people rejected 
Him and His hope for them. But while He was 
leading this forlorn hope, a greater and deeper 
process was also afoot. The writer of the Fourth 
Gospel, with a true biological insight, has perceived 
that the real achievement of Jesus lay not so much 
in the accomplishment of a specific set task as in 
the kindling of His own life in men and women. 
It shows us Jesus quickening life in bound, diseased 
and dead souls; and those wayside operations that 
seem in the Synoptics to be merely incidental to 


82. NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


His public task appear in the Fourth Gospel to be 
the real business of His ministry. He was laying 
the foundations of the future by evoking a new 
quality and dimension of life in ordinary folk, in 
the disciples and in other persons whom He encoun- 
tered. So that even at the moment when His public 
work was undone, there stood at the foot of the 
Cross a little group in whom this life had been 
awakened and who were presently to become the 
New Israel which should take to mankind the vision 
and the message that the Old Israel had rejected. 
That they were not then aware of what had hap- 
pened to them is little to the point; but their subse- 
quent record shows that a new thing had been born 
in them which was destined to expand far beyond 
their own group. Within a short time the disciples 
who had hitherto been held together by their com- 
mon devotion to Jesus were consolidated into a 
society which has maintained its continuity to this 
present time. 

St. Paul came upon the scene a little later; and 
though he was not of the original group of dis- 
ciples, it was he who gave the world the classic 
interpretation of Jesus and His significance. It is 
sometimes laid against St. Paul that he actually 
distorted the mind of Jesus and set the Christian 
tradition on a wrong track. But this is a position 
that cannot be taken seriously by students who 
have the patience to dig beneath the temporary and 
transient elements in St. Paul to the essential core 
of what he had to say to the world. An unimagi- 
native and pedantic reading of his Epistles and a 
failure to take account of the movement of his mind 


NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 83 


may lead us to suppose that he loaded the Gospel 
with much extraneous and irrelevant matter. But, 
to take a single instance, the eschatology which 
dominated him when he wrote the Thessalonian 
Epistles shrinks to a very small place even in the 
first Corinthian Epistle, which probably comes next 
in order of time; and though there is a clinging 
strain of eschatology in the later epistles, it is evi- 
dent that it has very little to do with the general 
current of his thought. Nor is it just to forget that 
the controversial atmosphere of Romans and Gala- 
tians involves an emphasis for which allowance 
must be made before we reach the normal and 
balanced mind of the writer. Moreover being a 
child of his own time and having a peculiar relig- 
ious, intellectual and social background of his own, 
he introduces much that seems irrelevant and 
remote to us to-day. “The main fact that has to 
be taken into account in any examination of St. 
Paul is his own conversion, his own participation 
in the life of the spirit; and his whole effort there- 
after was to expound what had happened to him 
and what seemed to him to issue from it. That 
he should interpret his own conversion primarily 
against the legal and moralistic background of his 
own Judaism was natural; but as the years went on 
it is evident that this view of the matter somewhat 
paled, and he tends more and more to interpret 
the experience in more subjective and mystical 
terms, acquired perhaps directly or indirectly 
through his Greek contacts. That “justification 
by faith’’ and the “‘new creation” refer to the same 
critical religious experience is evident. But the 


84 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


former reflects an outward change, a change of 
status; the latter a change of nature. Indeed, it 
may be said that broadly his tendency was toward 
a more biological idiom in his treatment of the idea 
of conversion. ‘“‘And you hath He made alive’; 
“the new man”; “‘Christ formed in you’’—such 
expressions as these represent a much more vitalistic 
feeling about the essential Christian experience. 
‘This tendency is carried much further in the Fourth 
Gospel which is almost entirely vitalistic in its tone. 
There is a dualism similar to St. Paul’s in St. 
Augustine’s interpretation of his own experience. 
In his moralistic exposition of his conversion and 
his doctrine of grace, he even out-Pauls Paul, but 
alongside of this there is a mystical account of the 
same experience which apparently derives from the 
saint’s Platonism. 

But it is not difficult to extricate the essential 
elements in St. Paul’s thought out of the special 
thought-forms in which he necessarily expressed 
them. ‘The two cardinal points around which his 
mind turns are the ideas of the “new man’’ and 
the new society. Perhaps nowhere in the Pauline 
writings do we find these two ideas more succinctly 
stated than in the second chapter of the Epistle to 
the Ephesians. It is indeed asserted by some scholars 
that this Epistle is not the handiwork of St. Paul; 
and the view appears to be supported by an exami- 
nation of the text. But even though the Epistle 
was written by another hand, the mind is unmis- 
takably St. Paul’s; and the thought of the Epistle 
has a clear family relationship to what are allowed 
to be authentic Pauline writings. “Che Epistle may 


NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 85 


be regarded, moreover, in the light of a circular or 
open letter—which may account for the verbal and 
stylistic peculiarities that lend color to the doubt 
of the Pauline authorship. When a man sits down 
to write a formal communication, he inevitably 
modifies his style and his diction; and it is evident 
that in this Epistle there is a deliberate endeavor 
to state the essential truth of the Christian Gospel 
inasummary form. It may well be that Ephesians 
is an epitome of the mature Pauline philosophy; 
certainly its main elements may be traced through 
all the previous Pauline documents. Moreover, 
there is in it no strain of controversy. In Romans 
and Galatians, the necessity of refuting the Juda- 
izers threw the emphasis upon justification by 
faith; but now with that controversy past and the 
next still to emerge, there is a juster proportion in 
St. Paul’s statement of the faith and the hope that 
he held. 

The second chapter of the Epistle falls into two 
parts. The first part has to do with the ‘‘new 
man. It is to be observed that none of the figures 
in which St. Paul had previously described the 
transition from the old man to the new appears 
here. Justification, adoption, redemption—the 
essential experience reflected in these figures is here, 
of course; but the picture is different. In these 
three metaphors, which are characteristic of the 
controversial period, the common denominator is 
the idea of a new beginning. An offender is pre- 
sented with a clean slate; an outsider is adopted 
into the family; a slave is bought into freedom. 
The individual in every case is conceived as having 


86 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


the opportunity of a fresh start. But these three 
figures represent external and quasi-legal transac- 
tions. “Iwo terms, which can hardly be called 
figures, are used in the second Corinthian Epistle 
which also convey the idea of a new beginning. 
The Judaizers had made little or no impression at 
Corinth—at least at the time when the Epistles 
were written—and the discussion has a flavor less 
legalistic. There St. Paul uses the terms “new 
creation”’ and “‘reconciliation.’’ But here again the 
notion of a new beginning is explicit. A man is 
remade; the enemy is turned to friend— in either 
case there is a new beginning. ‘There is a definite 
break with the past, and the individual has a fresh 
start in a new direction. But in Ephesians II we 
have the most radical of all St. Paul’s figures, 
namely, the figure of resurrection from death, of 
quickening a dead soul; and it is in this same Epistle 
that he speaks of ‘‘the new man.” 

In the second half of the chapter, St. Paul speaks 
of the new society, the divine commonwealth into 
which the new man is embodied; and it is plain that 
he conceives of it as the ultimate human society, 
transcending all frontiers of race and superseding 
all other human societies whatsoever. 


5. THE QUICKENED SOUL.” When St. Paul 
speaks of the quickening of dead souls, what does 
he mean? It is to his Epistle to the Romans that 
we have to turn for our answer. It has already 
been observed that the world St. Paul looked out 
upon seemed to him to be under sentence of death. 
It was a world “‘given up to a reprobate mind,” 


NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 87 


“subjected to vanity,’’ a world under arrest, a world 
“in the bondage of corruption,” festering in its 
stagnation. Yet it was expecting and groaning in 
the hope of deliverance, waiting for the emergence 
of a new regenerate race. From this bondage it 
would be delivered when “‘the sons of God” 
appeared. ‘The expression “‘sons of God’’ had a 
history previous to St. Paul’s use of it; and it some- 
times embodied vaguely the expectation of a race 
of men which should partake of the nature of God. 
Some of us, says St. Paul, have already been rescued 
from this slough of death; we are “‘the first fruits 
of the spirit’’; we are indeed not finished products, 
but we are at least on the way. We have become 
sharers of divinity, for we possess the spirit. It 
has frequently been observed that in this passage 
St. Paul seems to have anticipated the idea of evolu- 
tion. Certainly the notion of the elan vital seems 
to be implicit here. It is not impertinent to suggest 
that his picture here is of an evolutionary cul-de-sac. 
On the face of it, the main current of the process 
has been arrested; it has turned back upon itself 
and is becoming degenerate. Yet out of sight the 
urge of life is plainly in travail with a new thing, 
in the labor of bringing forth the new race of the 
sons of God. In some of us, says St. Paul, the 
elan vital, which is the spirit, has made a beginning 
and is bringing us to perfection. 

This then is the specific Christian experience. 
We are lifted up from the plant of ‘‘nature,”’ of 
natural manhood, on which we are doomed to 
degeneracy and extinction, to a new level of life 
and a new stage of development. Perhaps St. Paul 


88 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


would not have put it in precisely this form, but 
certainly this mode of statement does no violence 
to his thought. “This however does not exhaust 
his view of the matter. For there is not merely 
a change in the nature of the new man, but a change 
also in his status and relationships, and in particular 
in his position in relation to God. The quickened 
soul stands in a free, direct, unmediated and friendly 
relation to God. ‘This apparently is the idea con- 
veyed by the word “‘grace’’—with the additional 
notion that this relationship is the free and uncon- 
strained gift of God, unmerited and unbought by 
the individual. 

The Fourth Gospel adopts and develops the 
Pauline view of the new nature. In that Gospel, 
the Logos incarnate is described in a number of 
episodes as quickening his own peculiar quality of 
life in men and women whom He encountered; and 
this aspect of the writer’s intention culminates in 
the great parable of the resurrection of Lazarus. 
‘This is not the place to discuss the critical questions 
started by the interpretation of the Fourth Gospel; 
but without prejudice to the historical character 
of the narratives, it is hardly to be doubted that 
the intention of the Gospel is interpretation rather 
than history. Moreover, there appears to be a 
systematic effort in the first part of the Gospel to 
indicate some of the characters of the newly kindled 
life in man. 

(1) Itis presented as possessing a new range and 
quality of perception, as it were, a new “‘sense.’’ 
This is implied in the characteristic and ubiquitous 
emphasis on sight and light. We meet the idea 


NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 89 


first in the prologue: ‘The life is the light of men”; 
and it appears in Jesus’ answer to Nicodemus as 
the first consequence of the birth from above: 
“Except a man be born from above, he cannot see 
the Kingdom of God.’’ The subject is treated more 
fully in the story of the man born blind, ‘hat is 
plainly a parable of the new super-sight, and it is 
evidently intended to convey the idea that the new 
life is endowed with the faculty to perceive reality 
otherwise unseen, to apprehend a world of ultimate 
values. William James says in one of his letters 
that the position of man in the universe is very 
much like that of a dog in a drawing-room. Just 
as there is a world of ideas, judgments and tastes 
beyond the dog’s world of smells and sounds and 
sights, so there is a world of experience and values 
beyond our workaday world; and the mark of the 
new life is that it has become aware of that trans- 
cendental world, that it sees (as Jesus said) the 
Kingdom of God. 

(2) The new life is characterized by a new 
dimension in the sphere of human relationships. 
This is evidently the main moral of that marvelous 
and intricate piece of symbolism which we know 
as the story of the woman of Samaria. ‘The story 
has indeed many morals—but this most of all— 
that when men have made a living contact with 
God they are raised above secular distinctions of 
race and even the accidental separations of religion. 

(3) The story of the healing of the impotent 
man is a parable of another aspect of the new expe- 
rience. The impotent man is most of us. Bergson 
in a notable passage speaks of the torpor which lies 


90 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


in wait for any animal species that desists from 
effort;** and it is a commonplace of human experi- 
ence how native inertia may overtake us and cause 
us to “‘settle down,”’ until at last we become incapa- 
ble of effort. “The impotent man is a symbol of 
this condition; and in his healing we are to discern 
the restoration of his capacity for effort. Our last 
glimpse of him is as he takes up his bed and walks 
away with it. But it is not merely that impotence 
is here transformed into power, but also that a 
parasite is restored to an independent life. 

(4) Common to both St. Paul and the Fourth 
Gospel is a consistent emphasis upon freedom. The 
new life is emancipated from the bondage of tradi- 
tion and custom. But this emancipation is wrought 
not by a violent breach with the common religious 
and social inheritance, but by an advance beyond 
it. As Jesus said, it was not his business to destroy 
the law but to fulfil it, to carry out its logic beyond 
its own existing frontiers. The new life is made 
free of the law not by denying the law but by 
transcending it. The letter of the law without was 
superseded by the spirit of the law within; and 
conduct which had been an affair of obligation and 
prescription becomes a spontaneous outworking of 
a living interior principle. ‘“The fruits of the spirit 
are love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, good- 
ness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control.’’ In con- 
sequence, the new life will not be subject to a 
standardized morality; its ‘‘righteousness’’ will be 
original, spontaneous and creative, not only exceed- 
ing the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, 
but its own as well. The new righteousness is of 


NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 91 


a dynamic sort, forever engaged in transcending its 
own best. 

But this brings us to the question of the new 
status of the quickened soul; and it is to St. Paul 
that we are chiefly to look for light upon the matter. 

(1) In the Pauline use, the word righteousness 
signifies chiefly not a character but a condition. In 
the Synoptic Gospels, the word may without strain 
be translated goodness; but in St. Paul the word 
signifies the state of being right with God. Justi- 
fication is the act by which we are set right with 
God. The discussion of the Greek verb translated 
to justify—whether it means to make or to declare 
one righteous—is beside the point. or to be 
declared righteous before God is to be made right- 
eous before God. ‘This condition is regarded as the 
reversal of a state of enmity toward God in which 
the natural man is said to be; and this suggests that 
the other Pauline word “‘reconciliation”’ is a richer 
and more direct description of what takes place 
between the sinner and God. ‘The position is best 
described in Dr. Oman’s expression ‘“‘a gracious 
relationship.’’** 

(2) That it is a gracious relationship means 
that it is free and unconstrained. No man is 
brought into it against his will; God so respects 
the freedom with which he has dowered human 
nature that He compels no man to come to Him. 
Yet the final meaning of our natural freedom is 
that we should come to God. And as it is free in 
its beginnings, so it continues free. It becomes the 
last term of freedom. 

» On the plane of nature, we can have at best no 


92 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


more than a relative freedom; and in the life that 
we live in the flesh, we can never be free of the 
limitations of time and space and of the thousand 
exigencies of secular existence. But even on this 
plane, the worst enemies of our freedom are of the 
moral sort. We are born and bred with the dead 
hand of tradition upon us; we are brought up in 
awe of public opinion and the policeman. We 
are never wholly emancipated from the bonds of 
custom and fashion; and our wills are never free 
of the tyranny of fear. Indeed, fear is the last 
enemy of our freedom. But when we enter the 
new life in grace, we are delivered from this enemy. 
For in this gracious relationship to God we have 
found an inalienable security. Nothing is so 
impressive in the New Testament as its consistent 
confidence in the security of the quickened soul. 
“No man shall be able to pluck them out of my 
Father’s hands.”” “I am persuaded that neither life 
nor death, nor angels nor principalities, nor things 
present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height 
nor depth nor any other creature shall be able to 
separate us from the love of God which is in Christ 
Jesus our Lord.’’ With such security, we have 
perfect freedom. 

(3) Because the English-speaking people are 
politically-minded, they are apt to think of freedom 
as an end in itself. But freedom is not an end but 
ameanstoanend. It is the condition under which 
a man can be himself and grow into the full dis- 
tinctive human thing it is in him to be. And the 
freedom of this gracious relationship to God is the 


NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 93 


condition under which we can reach the full stature 
of personality. 

For one thing, it is the only condition under 
which he can achieve a full self-consciousness. The 
gracious relation to God is direct and unmediated. 
The soul is confronted by the Absolute. On the 
plane of nature, there is no absolute against which 
We can measure ourselves, no clear unshadowed 
mirror in which we can see our own faces. In that 
region, our measurements have reference not to 
absolutes but to averages. But there comes a 
moment in experience when a man sees himself in 
the mirror of God. His individuality stands out 
stark and separate. For the first time he can say 
an absolute I and Me and Mine. It is the moment 
of absolute self-discovery. For most men it is, 
alas, a self-discovery in shame; it is a disclosure of 
failure, of having come short of the glory which 
it beholds. And no one ever says “‘I’’ so convinc- 
ingly to himself, with so unqualified a certitude, as 
when he has to join it to the verb to sin, as David 
had once to do: “Against Thee, Thee only, have 
I sinned.’ But because the relationship is of grace, 
it is, as we have seen, a state of reconciliation. And 
the reconciled soul henceforth stands in a condition 
in which it can grow toward its destiny, which is 
to be conformed to the image of the son of God, 
to “‘come to the full-grown man of the measure 
of the stature of the fullness of Christ.’’ 

(4) Nevertheless, this gracious relationship is 
- not to be conceived merely as a status between two 
separate entities. For the soul partakes of the 
divine nature, enters into some kind of organic 


94 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


oneness with God. “It is God that worketh in you 
both to will and to do of his good pleasure.”’ In 
the Fourth Gospel, this union is conceived in terms 
of the indwelling Word or the indwelling Spirit. 
In St. Paul it is chiefly the indwelling Christ, 
“Christ in you,’ though, as we have seen, the Spirit 
is also regarded as the organ of this union with 
God. Moreover, in St. Paul the Christ-life is to 
be reproduced in the redeemed soul. Christ is to 
be “formed within’’; and the soul thus indwelt by 
Christ is to enter into the fellowship of His suffer- 
ings, to be conformed to His death and to share 
in the resurrection. Yet there is nothing in this 
process to destroy the identity of the soul. “I am 
crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live; yet not 
I but Christ that liveth in me.’ The self would 
appear to be even more vividly and consciously 
itself than before. 

We have seen that there is reasonable ground 
for the presumption that there was a biological 
tendency toward the evolution of a free self- 
governing individual. This achievement was pos- 
sible, however, only in so far as the individual was 
able to rise to some measure of independence of his 
environment. So long as his growth was to any 
substantial extent conditioned by his environment, 
there was an evident limit to his progress; and from 
the nature of the case, so long as his development 
was on the purely physical or rather ‘‘natural’’ 
plane, it is clear that he would be largely dependent 
and his growth conditioned by his physical environ- 
ment. We have recalled man’s persistent effort to 
rise beyond his physical environment through the 


NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 95 


srowth of his mind and the development of relig- 
ion. May we not now add that what we have 
just been considering is the process by which man 
is to reach what so far as we can now seen is the 
final term of freedom and individuality? Of this 
new manhood Jesus is the type and the promise; 
and the present business of Life is to produce men 
who are growing into the likeness and the nature 
of Christ. From which we may fairly infer that 
the undying human aspiration called religion and 
in especial that form of religion which crowns this 
aspiration, namely, Christianity, is the onward 
thrust of life toward the next level of existence, 
which, in a Pauline idiom, we may call the King- 
dom of Grace. 


6. THE DIVINE COMMONWEALTH. The second 
part of the second chapter of Ephesians shows us 
a picture of the society of ‘‘new men’; and while 
here St. Paul chiefly emphasizes the universality of 
the new society, we may from his general treatment 
of it divine its main features. 

The first distinction of the new society was that 
it was composed of people who stood to God in 
a gracious personal relationship. Its basis was 
religious. We must not suppose that St. Paul’s 
conception of the new society had any analogy 
with the mystery-cults that flourished in his day. 
For him Christianity was not a superior cult, for 
the cult was exclusive and sectarian. Nor was it 
a new type of piety that showed some improve- 
ment upon Judaism. It was a way of life which 
embraced the whole of life. St. Paul’s view of the 


96 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


new society was no doubt colored by his Jewish 
background; for there he saw a nation or a state 
which was also a church. ‘That at least was the 
Jewish dream. And St. Paul’s conception of the 
church was that it was to be a self-contained and 
self-sufficient society, which would in time develop 
its own political and economic life, but which did 
rest not upon the accident of geographical neighbor- 
hood, but upon the common personal relation of 
its members to God. 

This personal relationship to God being one of 
grace, the mutual relationship of the members must 
naturally be of the same order. It was to be a 
commonwealth of freedom. Most human societies 
were held together by outward compulsion; their 
unity rested upon force and coercion, and that 
necessarily implied limitations upon the freedom of 
their members. But just as God respects the 
autonomy of the soul, so the members of this society 
were to respect each other’s autonomy. Ina purely 
political society there will always be limitations on 
personal freedom: the anarchy of the natural man 
has to be held in check lest it encroach upon the 
liberties of his neighbor. But here within this 
society of regenerate souls there must needs be 
another bond of union; and that bond of union 
is love. Here is the regulative principle of the 
Pauline ethics. For him Christian conduct was 
conduct that made for the unity and the increase 
of the divine commonwealth. The energy of social 
cohesion in the divine commonwealth is love. It 
is hardly necessary to observe that to St. Paul love 


NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 97 


had a connotation somewhat different from that 
of modern popular and sentimental usage. 
Further, because this society rested upon a per- 
sonal relation to God, it transcended all those 
distinctions of class, caste, nationality and race 
which entered so deeply into the constitution of 
natural societies. “here was no difference between 
the slave and his owner, between the Jew and the 
Greek, even between the male and the female. The 
walls of partition that divided mankind had disap- 
peared within the Church. Just as there was no 
respect of persons or peoples with God, so there 
Was none in the divine society. Other societies 
were divided against each other and within them- 
selves by accidents of blood and color, of race and 
station, but not so the Church. Here there is “‘one 
man in Christ Jesus.’”’ ‘The note of the new society 
was its universality; membership was accessible to 
every man upon the same terms. The first corol- 
lary of this universality was its missionary office; 
and the early Church seems to have entered upon 
the business of propaganda as a matter of course. 
The history of the early Church is indeed the story 
of a wide and rapid diffusion of the new society, 
and the rate of its growth indicates the release of a 
very powerful tide of spiritual vitality. Another 
sidelight upon the universality of the early Church 
is its mutual helpfulness. It is not perhaps without 
its significance that the Church at Antioch distin- 
guished itself both by the help it sent to the famine- 
stricken brethren in Judza and by its mission of 
Paul and Barnabas on their journey of propaganda 
to the West; and that it was here that the disciples 


98 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


$ 


were first called ‘‘Christians,’”’ which signifies that 
they had been identified as a separate and distinct 
body that needed a name of its own. 

But because it was established on a religious 
basis, its life must gather around its worship. The 
foundations must be strengthened by a common 
worship of God; and from the first the new society 
was a worshiping society. It recognized that at 
the very heart of its life there must be a systematic 
and continuous renewal of its religious source. 

This then was the new commonwealth, a society 
established upon the relation of its members to God, 
a society which lived in freedom and was bound 
together by love; which conceived itself to be uni- 
versal in its constitution and in its obligations; and 
which renewed and confirmed its life by ordered 
worship. ‘This does not mean that it was in any 
sense a loosely knit and unorganized society. We 
know that it had officers, and that as time went on 
there was increasing differentiation of function 
within the society. It evolved a technique for its 
life; and it had its own rules and disciplines. 

But it is of special importance that we keep in 
mind that, though it was a religious society, it was 
not a society that began and ended with religious 
exercises. Just as it was universal in its terrestrial 
outlook, so it was ideally universal in its qualitative 
outlook upon life. It intended to embrace all 
necessary human concerns within itself. It was to 
be a new type of human society which would per- 
form for its members and for which its members 
would perform all the operations necessary both for 
its own and for their maintenance and increase. It 


NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 99 


conceived itself to be in some sense from the begin- 
ning what was afterwards called a societas perfecta, 
a complete self-governing and self-sufficing society. 
For instance, it established judicial processes for its 
own members, who were expected not to go to law 
with one another before the secular courts; and 
while its members were not forbidden to have busi- 
ness and social intercourse with the pagan society 
around them, it was to be done with the under- 
standing that they did not in any way compromise 
their own society. And it is fair to gather that 
in St. Paul’s mind this new society was to supersede 
or to assimilate into itself all other societies what- 
soever, even the Empire itself. We have one echo 
of St. Paul’s preaching which suggests how much 
he had in his mind. ‘These that have turned the 
world upside down are come hither also. . . and 
these all act contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying 
that there is another king, one Jesus.” 

Dr. Moffatt’s happy translation of Phil. iii. 20, 
We are a colony of heaven, also throws light upon 
the function of the new society. A Roman colony 
was founded in order to romanize the surrounding 
territory and to assimilate it to the Empire. Philippi 
was such acolony. The city of Philadelphia was 
established as a Greek colony for the purpose of 
diffusing Hellenic speech and culture in the Phrygian 
tableland, at the gateway to which it was settled. 
“We are a colony of heaven,” likewise; and we 
exist in order to assimilate the surrounding world 
to the divine commonwealth. By living its own 
life and by spreading its own light, it was to chris- 
tianize the pagan society amid which it lived and 


100 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


to absorb it into the Kingdom of God. It would 
gather the life of the world to itself; and the exist- 
ing machinery and institutions of the social life of 
mankind would perish from sheer functionlessness. 
It would draw the water from their wheels into 
its own. 

When Jesus saw the futility of His first hope 
that a new order of life might be brought into the 
world through the existing institutions, He spoke 
the parable of the new wine and the old wineskins. 
He saw that the new life could not function through 
the old organs; and instead of following the usual 
course of the reformer and the revolutionary in an 
effort to destroy the old organs, He set Himself to 
the creation of a new organ. ‘That was the first 
company of disciples; and perhaps it is fair to infer 
that his expectations were that the new organ 
would absorb more and more of the life of the 
nation, leaving the existing organs to decay because 
they had no office to perform. It had seemed to 
him at that point possible to win his people as a 
whole into the great enterprise, given sufficient time. 
But in this expectation he was disappointed. 
Nevertheless, the new organ which He had brought 
into being for the purposes of the new life came to 
function, perhaps even more swiftly and on a much 
larger scale than He had anticipated. 

We may perhaps gather also that He proposed 
that the new organ should make obsolete not the 
existing institutions of Judaism only, but those of 
the Roman Empire as well. He did not share His 
fellow countrymen’s attitude to the Romans. To 
Him, the Zealot movement only promised to 


NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY 101 


tighten the Roman bonds. As things were, the 
Romans allowed a sufficient margin of liberty to 
enable the people to live their own independent 
religious and cultural life, and even to fulfil their 
destiny, as He saw it. Possibly to Him the very 
proximity of the Roman made him the first external 
object toward which the new life should direct 
itself. But, in any case, His thought was of a new 
order of life, with its own appropriate organ, real- 
izing itself and expanding in entire independence 
of existing institutions. And such indeed the 
Church became and remained for a considerable 
period of time. 

It is hardly necessary to add that in the new 
society St. Paul saw the legitimate successor of his 
own nation. He was Jew enough to be unable to 
recognize this without great sorrow; but he saw 
clearly that the Jew had renounced his office and 
his destiny in the divine providence, though he 
believed that his people might yet be rescued by a 
change of heart. Israel had made perhaps the 
greatest of all contributions to the growth of the 
race by its achievement of a monotheistic faith; but 
when it failed to see the logic of that faith, first 
of all in the vision of its prophets and finally in 
Jesus’ doctrine of the Kingdom of God, it renounced 
its place of primacy in the spiritual evolution of the 
race. Yet it was out of the loins of Jewry that the 
new manhood and the new human society came 
forth; and St. Paul had not only legitimate senti- 
ment but historical right behind him when he 
thought and spoke of the young Christian Society 
as the New Israel. 


102 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


But the last stage in St. Paul’s view of the Church 
is his conception of it as the Body of Christ. It is 
difficult to assign a satisfactory meaning to this 
figure unless we interpret it with Bishop Gore as 
implying that, in St. Paul’s mind, the Church was 
the extension of the Incarnation. The Word that 
became flesh in Jesus is made flesh continually in 
a historical society. The Eternal Christ who was 
incarnate in Jesus in a body of flesh abides incarnate 
in the Church in a body of believers. The new 
principle and quality of life which were manifested 
fully and uniquely in Jesus of Nazareth continue 
active and creative in the world in the society of 
His followers, 


PART III 
THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 


1. THE EARLY CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 
Now and again an effort is made to bring about 
social change by setting afoot within the com- 
munity an independent movement having its own 
institutions and organs, in the hope that it may 
absorb the common life into itself and leave the 
existing social institutions to atrophy from lack of 
use. Robert Owen in the last century, having no 
hope of social amelioration through the political 
institutions of his time, preached a doctrine of 
political indifferentism and induced the workers to 
form codperative societies by means of which they 
could establish a new social order quite independent 
of the society which surrounded them. ‘This 
movement showed great promise; and it is impos- 
sible to say how far it might not have gone had it 
not become involved in Owen’s fantastic labor- 
exchange and its disastrous collapse. Later the 
Christian Socialists associated themselves with the 
Trade Unions, having a similar end in view and 
Winning similar initial success; and there are 
grounds for supposing that its failure was at least 
partly due to the effort to give the Trade Unions a 
recognized civil status through parliamentary legis- 
lation. When Sinn Fein established its own judicial 
courts in Ireland, functioning alongside the existing 
courts and intended to displace them, it was acting 

103 


104 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


on the same principle; and Mr. Gandhi's recent 
policy in India seems to aim at organizing the social 
processes of India independently of the imperial 
processes with a view to making the latter function- 
less and nugatory. 

The parable of the wineskins suggests that Jesus 
had in mind the creation of a society within the 
Jewish nation that should ultimately absorb the 
whole life of the nation and gradually displace the 
existing institutions both ecclesiastical and political. 
In any case, it is quite certain that in the early 
stages of its history the Church lived a life apart 
from and independent of the life of the Roman 
Empire. ‘The early Christians,’”’ says Lord Acton, 
“avoided contact with the State, abstained from 
the responsibilities of office and were even reluctant 
to serve in the army.’ Nor did the Empire encour- 
age the Christians to take up a different attitude; 
it was an accepted principle that “‘a Christian was 
necessarily disloyal and outlawed by virtue of the 
name and confession.’’? ‘The persecuting attitude 
of the Empire drove the Christian society more and 
more in upon itself, and in so doing helped the 
Church to evolve a more or less complete social life 
of its own. While it is true that the Church’s 
members had social and commercial relations with 
their pagan neighbors, it was in the Church that, 
according to Ulhorn, “they found their life’s 
center.... [he Church became a State within the 
State. [he Christian found his point of support 
in the Church; to it belonged the first of all his 
affections and his service; there he sought not only 
the word of life and what conduced to his salvation. 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 105 


but he there sought also, in the episcopal tribunal, 
his rights and aid when he was in trouble.’’® 

At the end of the third century the Christian 
community numbered little more than a twentieth 
part of the population of the Empire; but ‘“‘what 
the Christians lacked in numbers they more than 
made up by their organization, unity, wealth and 
driving power.’’* The Empire was decadent, the 
Church still full of youthful vigor; ‘‘the State grew 
poor, the Church became rich; the State lost ‘its 
influence on popular life; the Church acquired what 
the State lost.’’® It is agreed that it was the impres- 
sion made by the vitality, power and unity of the 
Church upon Constantine that first led the Emperor 
to consider whether it was not indispensable to the 
preservation of the Empire.* Followed upon this 
the conversion of Constantine and the compact by 
which the Church was accepted as the established 
religion of the Empire. So began the great 
misadventure. 

‘That the Church could have accepted this asso- 
ciation with the Empire seems to indicate that there 
had been some change in its temper and its concep- 
tion of itself; and an examination does actually 
reveal a tendency to incrustation. It is a common- 
place that two hostile institutions living face to face 
with one another tend to become like one another: 
and when Ulhorn speaks of the Church having 
become a “‘State,”” he is more right than he sup- 
poses. There was a definite movement in the 
Church toward centralization of authority and 
incorporation, a hardening of spirit which made 


106 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


the compact with Constantine a less difficult affair 
than it might have been at an earlier stage. 


What actually happened was that two cor- 
porations entered into a concord by which the 
one party attained a certain recognized pres- 
tige and power as the price of subordinating 
itself to the ultimate purposes of the other. 
The Empire did not become Christian in any 
sense; henceforth the Church was less than 
Christian. Constantine, it has been said, 
rendered lip-service to the Church; and the 
Church promised life-service to the Emperor. 
It was henceforth delivered from persecution, 
but it had surrendered its independence. For 
men to whom this tendency toward centrali- 
zation and incorporation had seemed impor- 
tant, in whose minds the idea of authority 
had gained a position never contemplated in 
the New Testament, it seemed a great oppor- 
tunity for the Church that it should become 
the recognized religious cult of the Empire. 
It meant political and social prestige, effective 
discipline, immediate safeguards for orthodoxy 
and much more; and it is not strange that 
they accepted the new situation.’ 


In effect, the Church became a part of the imperial 
civil service. 

But the Church did not save the Empire. In 
less than a century the Empire was in ruins and 
Alaric and his Goths had taken Rome. The Church 
was involved in its downfall. However, it sur- 
vived; and it was the Church that preserved to the 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 107 


world the elements of permanent value in the 
Roman civilization. Not yet has it outgrown the 
consequences of the evil day of its compact with 
Constantine. For the four or five centuries follow- 
ing the Fall of Rome, its history, apart from a few 
scattered oases of light, is of a piece with the general 
degradation of Europe during that period. 


2 ote AUGUSTINE: 1f,.\ with, Dr:~ Hastings 
Rashdall,* we fix upon the year 1000 A. D. as the 
time whereabout Europe arose out of the long 
death of the Dark Ages, we may not forget that 
it arose bringing a good deal of treasure with it. 

Most of all there was St. Augustine. Whether 
St. Augustine was last of the ancients or first of the 
moderns is a pretty question which you may answer 
as you will, and none may prove you wrong. For 
in fact he was both. He has been described, not 
inaptly, as the “‘conduit’’ by which the living 
elements of the old world were carried over into 
the new. Much that was of abiding value in the 
mind of antiquity seems to have been gathered up 
in him. The spiritual treasure of three classic 
cultures—Greece, Jewry and Rome—went into his 
inheritance; and with these he had the New Testa- 
ment and the tradition of four Christian centuries. 
He lived at the latter end of a great civilization; 
and in that desolate time, he stands by himself, 
like a lone Alp amid a wilderness of undistinguished 
foothills. His wide scholarship, his incomparable 
mind, his courage—these alone would have given 
him a natural preéminence among his contempo- 
raries; but in that hour of the world, they imposed 


108 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


upon him a vocation in which his achievements 
gained for his name an authority to which at this 
distant day we respectfully and confidently appeal. 
In the schools they still say that everything goes 
back to Augustine; and the saying is true. 

Before all else St. Augustine was a great Chris- 
tian. He had been (to use a vivid modernism 
strictly appropriate to his case) “‘soundly con- 
verted.”” ‘This capital experience kindled in him 
a passionate flame for the Kingdom of God, to 
which all his inheritance became fuel; and this 
burning was henceforth his life. He spent his days 
in expounding the great thing that had happened 
to him and all that was contained in it. He tells 
the story in his Confessions; but the experience 
itself is felt as a glow and a throb in everything 
that he wrote. ‘There are those who tell us that 
St. Augustine gave the world its first philosophy 
of history; yet it was the last thing he meant to do. 
When he sat down to write the De Civitate Dei, 
only one thing was in his mind. He would uphold 
the truth of Christianity against all comers.® 

Yet the truth of Christianity did not lie in his 
mind as a self-consistent whole; it is indeed proba- 
ble that it will not so lie in any man’s mind. Per- 
haps it was rather St. Augustine’s role to state the 
problems which they would have to solve who 
came after him. He accepted the twin Pauline 
doctrines of Grace and the Divine Society; but on 
the one hand he never fully reconciled his Platonism 
to his Paulinism in the interpretation of his religious 
experience, nor on the other did he resolve the 
contradiction between the biblical ‘‘communion of 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 109 


saints’ and the institutional Church. Beside these 
two radical dilemmas, there are others of a lesser 
kind which derive from them. ‘The final impres- 
sion we receive is that on many matters St. Augus- 
tine never reached a settled mind; and in conse- 
quence there has hardly been a controversy in 
Christendom since his day in which he has not been 
triumphantly quoted on both sides of the argument. 

Perhaps no single Christian document outside the 
Scriptures has provoked so voluminous a comment 
or so prolific a literature as St. Augustine’s De Civi- 
tate Det. ‘The central idea of the book may have 
been borrowed from the Donatist Tyconius; but 
it is in fact implicit in the New Testament—a 
divine society living in a world organized without 
God. ‘There are two cities, says St. Augustine, one 
of the earth earthy, the other from heaven. The 
earthly city is the “‘world,’’ the common secular 
mass; the heavenly city is the community of the 
redeemed. It isa city whose eyes are turned heaven- 
ward, “the pilgrim city of King Christ’; but it has 
citizens in the flesh who constitute the Church, the 
promise and the terrene counterpart of the eternal 
city. “It is recorded of Cain that he founded a 
city, but Abel was a pilgrim and built none. For 
the city of the saints is above, though it have citizens 
here upon earth, wherein it lives as a pilgrim until 
the time of the Kingdom come.’’” It is with the 
story of these two cities that St. Augustine occupies 
himself. It is a double thread upon which on his 
way he hangs much philosophy and theology and 
history, both sacred and profane; and numberless 


110 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


treatises might be written upon the various aspects 
of the great argument. 

Of the civitas terrena, he says no more than he 
must. The first earthly city, he tells us, was 
founded by a fratricide, alluding to Cain, but with 
a pertinent side-glance at Romulus. And justice 
apart, he asks, what is a kingdom but a srand 
larceny? He observes that pagan societies somehow 
manage to hang together and to enjoy an inward 
peace; and this he ascribes to the presence in them 
of justice (that is, the rule of legal right) or of 
general consent. But their essential character 
remains unchanged. ‘They were conceived in sin 
and shapen in iniquity; and they only stand because 
in the wisdom of God they have been enabled to 
reach an elementary level of morality.” 

From the nature of the case, the frontier line 
between the two cities was hard to draw. The 
saints may be strangers and pilgrims on the earth; 
but they cannot avoid entanglement in the terres- 
trial society. He even conceives of them as loyal 
citizens of the earthly city; and in one of his most 
famous passages he shows what manner of man a 
Christian prince would be.** Under these circum- 
stances, it was impossible to maintain consistently 
the view of the civitas Dei as a world-fleeing com- 
munion of saints. The effect of the contiguity of 
the two societies, in fact and in his own mind, was 
to introduce a ‘‘political’’ bias into his thought of 
the Christian society; and it is possible to gather 
from his writings two contradictory views of it. 
On the one hand, it is the communion of saints on 
its way to its heavenly home; on the other, it is 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE Lu 


an institution, an organized polity, equipped with 
the needful machinery for the conduct of its affairs 
and the maintenance of its life. In opposition to 
the chiliasm of his own time, he affirms the Church 
to be the millennial reign of Christ. It is true that 
a theoretic distinction may be made between the 
civitas Det and the Church; they are related but 
not quite identical, but in practice the distinction 
is hard to maintain. “The Church claims for itself 
certain attributes of the earthly city; and presently 
making confusion worse confounded, it makes use 
for its own ends of the resources of the civitas 
terrena. St. Augustine, albeit reluctantly, consents 
to the use of the secular arm to constrain the Donat- 
ists into conformity; and consequently he has to 
make a more kindly estimate of the civil state than 
his premises actually allow. Yet there can be no 
question as to his position and meaning. Granted 
the existence of such a thing as a Christian state, 
its place is in the bosom of the Church; it exists 
to serve the ends of the Church.** Plainly we are 
at the beginning of an argument which in capable 
hands may grow to prove that the Church may 
first use, then direct, then control, and finally 
absorb, the State—which argument did in due time 
reach its final term in the doctrine of the Church 
as a societas perfecta, a complete and self-sufficing 
society. 

That St. Augustine did not foresee such a con- 
clusion to his argument is as sure as anything can 
well be. Certainly he gives us no ground for sup- 
posing that he anticipated anything comparable to 
the medieval idea of a universal Christian Church- 


112 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


State governed by a hierarchy. True, he did speak 
of a single commonwealth embracing all Christians; 
but he was then thinking less of the economy than 
of the universality of the Kingdom of God. ‘The 
Middle Ages built their own edifice out of St. 
Augustine’s unfinished philosophy; and he is not 
chargeable with the result. And if he was not 
always consistent with himself, he was not the first 
to be dogged by the inconsistencies which must 
follow at the heels of those who venture into what 
Lord Acton describes as ‘‘the undiscovered country 
where Church and State are parted’’—that same 
country where also heaven and earth, the unseen 
and the seen, the spirit and the flesh, meet. Massive 
as St. Augustine’s equipment was, he lacked the 
sure amphibious instinct which a man must have if 
he is to traverse this uncharted borderland without 
many an entanglement. 

The failure to effect a reconciliation between the 
civitas Dei which was on its way to heaven, and 
the Church which had taken lodgings (however 
temporary) on the earth was only one of the 
dilemmas with which he left posterity to struggle. 
It is said of him that he rediscovered the Pauline 
doctrine of grace; and of his own experience of 
the irresistibility and the sufficiency of grace his 
Confessions tell the story. But his far more than 
Pauline doctrine of predestination on the one hand, 
and on the other the necessity of allowing to the 
Church the mediation of grace through the sacra- 
ments rob grace of the freedom and the spon- 
taneity that it has in St. Paul’s treatment of it. 
Moreover, his personal experience of grace came to 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 113 


a mind steeped in Neo-Platonism, and his inter- 
pretation of his experience is a not whoily congru- 
ous blending of scriptural phraseology and Neo- 
platonic ideas. As time went on, he seems to have 
approached a more purely Pauline position, but 
he did not live long enough to complete the journey. 
His doctrine of grace, however, was destined to 
have significant consequences for a later age. 


3. THE DARK AGEs. Lord Bryce thought that 
it was hardly too much to say that the Holy Roman 
Empire was built on the foundation of the De Civi- 
tate Det. ‘This doubtless goes beyond the fact. But 
St. Augustine’s influence upon the thought and the 
affairs of succeeding generations can hardly be over- 
stated. His word was authoritative in his own 
lifetime, and a few years after his death a Pope 
rebuked the Bishops of Gaul for allowing his 
authority to be questioned in their dioceses. But 
in those days darkness had covered the earth. The 
Roman civilization was dying a miserable death. 
Its dissolution let loose barbaric passions; culture 
almost wholly disappeared; and religion was with- 
out life or energy. “The degradation of the Papacy 
is at once a symbol and a measure of the degeneracy 
of religion. For four centuries the only interval of 
light amid the darkness is the pontificate of Gregory 
the Great, who did somewhat rehabilitate a dis- 
credited Papacy. But it is significant of the depth 
into which culture had fallen that this same Gregory 
should denounce secular learning.*° Despite the 
recovery of papal respectability with Gregory, the 
years that followed him were darker than those 


114. NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY, 


which had preceded. For two centuries Europe 
was at the lowest ebb of its civilization; and it 
seemed as though the world had been hopelessly 
wrecked. Yet the names of Boniface and Willibrod 
remind us that, even in that dismal period, a few 
oases of life remained; and Ireland stands out in 
lone distinction as the only part of Europe which 
had escaped the general decay.*° There religion and 
scholarship went hand in hand with a missionary 
passion that brought light to many places in the 
continental darkness. 

The reign of Charles the Great brought another 
break in the clouds; and though the brightness 
waned, Europe was never so dark, even in the 
miserable tenth century, after Charles as it had been 
in the seventh and eighth centuries. We may even 
go so far as to say that Charles set afoot the recov- 
ery of Europe; and it is at this time that St. Augus- 
tine’s influence began to make way. Charles was 
something of a student; and his son-in-law Einhard 
tells us that the De Civitate Det was his favorite 
reading. It is probably more than a fancy that 
Charles found in the ‘‘Mirror of Princes’ a picture 
of himself as he would like to be, and in that event 
he would modify Augustine’s doctrine to fit his 
own case. That he did so cannot be proved, but 
it is a fair conjecture that he, being a Christian 
prince, might have regarded himself as the head of 
a commonwealth such as St. Augustine’s una res- 
publica omnium christianoroum. What seems clear 
is that he took a religious view of himself and of 
his empire; and while he can hardly be said to have 
founded the Holy Roman Empire, he did at least 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 115 


dream of something like it, and tried to make the 
dream come true. Of a commonwealth which 
embraced both Church and Empire he did indeed 
consider himself the head; nor was this his own 
thought only, as is evident from the circumstance 
that Pope Leo, who put the imperial crown on 
Charles’ head (Christmas Day, A. D. 800), never- 
theless conducted himself as Charles’ subject. 

Charles’ most lasting distinction rests upon his 
zeal for learning and education; and in this he did 
undoubtedly lay the train of European recovery. 
But the time had not yet arrived when the forces 
of recovery could overcome the inertia and chaos 
of the age. Charles’ effort was almost submerged 
in a powerful reaction; and the Papacy sank into 
unspeakable depths of degradation. It was ‘‘the 
period of pornocracy.’”’ The Empire of Charles 
the Great was broken up and it finally disappeared 
with Charles the Fat (A. D. 888). But the names 
of Claudius of Turin, Agobard of Lyons, John 
Scotus Eringena and others serve to inform us of 
a stream, however meager, of independent intellec- 
tual life, even in that desolate period. This we 
may indeed ascribe to Charles the Great’s revival 
of education, which lasted in spite of the influences 
of reaction and lived to become the great intellec- 
tual renaissance of the twelfth century. 

‘The tenth century was the darkness before dawn; 
indeed, it had not gone far beyond its first decade 
before we observe a very pregnant sign of the dawn. 
In 911 the monastery of Cluny was founded in 
order to initiate a return to the faithful observance 
of the Rule of St. Benedict. To the significance 


116 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


of this movement we must presently return; mean- 
time, it is enough to record it. The movement 
spread widely and rapidly. The independent 
Benedictine monasteries were federated around 
Cluny; and the system was organized on the basis 
of the prevailing feudalism. At the beginning of 
the twelfth century, theré were two thousand Bene- 
dictine houses associated in the Cluniac system. 

It is also pertinent to note that in A. D. 962 Otto 
the Great was crowned Emperor of Rome. ‘He 
was the true founder of the Holy Roman Empire, 
Germanic in its seat of power, Roman in its conse- 
cration, its idea and its claim to Italian suprem- 
acy.” The moment is important, for it represents 
a definite stage in the development of the relations 
of Church and Empire. Leo might crown Charles 
the Great and yet regard himself as his subject; but 
the specific doctrine of the Holy Roman Empire 
as it henceforth appears is that the Church and 
State are regarded as “the names of two great 
departments, ecclesiastical and civil,’’ each with its 
own head, the Pope and the Emperor. Under Otto 
and Pope Silvester, who were friends, this appor- 
tionment of the things that are Caesar’s and the 
things that are God’s might, as it did, work. But 
plainly it contained the seeds of discord. From this 
time onward, we follow an incessant struggle for 
supremacy between the Empire and the Church,* 
a struggle in which the issue was largely determined 
by ideas and influences which we have to trace back 
to the Cluniac revival. 

Two further circumstances of this period have 
a certain bearing upon our study. ‘The first of 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 117 


these is the Norse invasion, which began as early 
as the reign of Charles the Great and continued 
till the cession to the Norsemen by Charles the 
Simple, in A. D. 911, of the territory since known 
as Normandy. At that time the Norsemen agreed 
to become Christians; and in their zeal for their 
new religion they became its protectors and founded 
monasteries within their domain. The great impor- 
tance of this invasion is that it brought an infusion 
of new blood into the native stock; and the acces- 
sion of strength to the life of France from its invad- 
ers is beyond question. For like other invaders in 
other lands, they were slowly assimilated into the 
people of the soil; and they became so French that 
in the later Middle Ages they were “‘the main agents 
in the spread of the French language and civiliza- 
tion.’’*® This reinforcement of the French stock 
meant not a little to the religious renewal that was 
then approaching. | 

The second circumstance was the evolution of 
feudalism. With the stages of the process we are 
not now concerned. It is, however, germane to 
our purpose to note that it reached its highest point 
of development in France. In Western Europe its 
special character was given to it by the combination 
of three factors: the relation of lord and vassal, 
the tenure of land and private jurisdiction over 
the fief. The system began with the king and 
descended through a hierarchy of vassal-lords to 
the vassal-freeman who held and used the soil. 
The grant of the fief at every stratum of the system 
was contingent on the agreement to render certain 
services to the lord, services which might be of a 


118 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


military, judicial, civil or pecuniary character. 
Theoretically it was an admirable system of social 
integration, though it was less admirable in practice. 
It became the model for the organization of the 
Cluniac system, and had far-reaching consequences 
on the religious history of succeeding ages. 


4. THE MEDIEVAL DAWN. It has been said 
that the revival of the Benedictine Rule was due 
to men of the military class who introduced into 
it the feudal spirit in which they had been nursed. 
The Benedictine houses had been affected by a gen- 
eral laxity, and the newcomers restored to the order 
something more than its original austerity of disci- 
pline. But in addition they organized this new, 
ordered life of religion on a feudal basis. ‘The monk’s 
vow to the abbot was the vassal’s to his lord—in a 
new setting; the abbot like the feudal lord was 
absolute within his domain, and as the Cluniac 
system grew he visited the subordinate abbots, as 
a feudal lord might visit those who held their fiefs 
from him; the associated monasteries made con- 
tributions to the mother house at Cluny. The 
whole order became a religious replica of the sur- 
rounding civil organization. This combination 
of strict religious discipline with a feudal organiza- 
tion was to have consequences far beyond anything 
its originators could foresee. “The Cluniac move- 
ment was essentially puritan in intention. Within 
the Benedictine Order itself, the short lived reforms 
of Benedict of Aniane had been followed by a 
deplorable reaction. “The age was a wilderness. 
Mankind was compared by a contemporary bishop 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 119 


to “the fish of the sea who live by devouring one 
another.’” Into this confusion the Cluniac move- 
ment introduced a principle of order. It began to 
canalize the vagrant and chaotic life of the time. 
The period may be compared to a waste marshland 
in which both land and water are useless and fruit- 
less; and Cluny started to dig a trench into which 
the waste waters were gathered, and both water 
and land were redeemed. This is indeed the 
‘biology’ of all puritan movements. “They appear 
when the customary sanctions and disciplines of life 
have disappeared, and society is falling to pieces. 
The river banks are swept away, and the unchan- 
neled waters turn life into a pestilent swamp. Then 
the puritan appears—to construct a new riverbank 
into which the waste waters may be gathered and 
life redeemed from destruction. Puritanism is 
always associated with discipline and austerity; it 
is necessarily “‘narrow,’’ because there are times in 
history when it is a narrow way that leads to life. 
Looking at the puritanism of England and New 
England, it is not easy to think well of its unbeau- 
tiful and ungenerous aspects; but a deeper historical 
insight may suggest that puritanism was life itself 
girt for its own rescue. It was a doctrine and tech- 
nique of economy in the interests of survival and 
fertility. It is not beside the point to observe that 
a similar ‘discipline’ among a group of men at 
Oxford in the eighteenth century gave them the 
nickname of Methodists and set afoot a great and 
revitalizing religious movement in England. 

So it was in France in the tenth century. The 
Cluniac reform drained the marshland that life 


120 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


-was in that day; and its economy—its disciplines 
and its austerities—did indeed make for survival 
and fertility. For with the beginning of the 
eleventh century we find a general and promising 
efflorescence of life. “This renewal did not continue 
without its setbacks; even the Cluniac impulse fell 
off sadly. But it is worth noting that the recoveries 
that followed came about in every case through a 
return to an ordered and disciplined religious life. 

Between the foundation of Cluny and the middle 
of the thirteenth century, it is possible to observe 
three great resurgences of life; each greater than 
its predecessor, each beginning in a “‘canalization”’ 
of life into religious order and discipline, each set- 
ting afoot a ferment of intellectual and aesthetic 
activity and each in its turn declining into routine 
and apathy. 

The first was that which sprang directly from 
Cluny, reaching its height in the early eleventh 
century. It was marked by the foundation of 
the Camadulian (1014) and the Vallambrosian 
(1038) Orders; the business of education was 
revived under Fulbert of Chartres; and the building 
of Jumiéges Abbey inaugurated a new age in sacred 
architecture. 

Then came a decline—but not of long duration. 
The new life was not yet so enfeebled as to be 
incapable of a revival. In the last quarter of the 
eleventh century we discover a new movement, 
beginning with the foundation of the Grandmon- 
tines (1076), Austin Canons (1078), the Carthu- 
sians (1084), culminating in a fresh revival of 
the Benedictine Rule at the abbey of Citeaux and 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 121 


in the Cistercian movement. Nor did the impulse 
stop there; for in 1100 the abbey of St. Victor was 
founded; in 1115 Clairvaux; and the Premonstra- 
tensian Order in 1120. 

Of the intellectual activity of this period, it is 
enough to say that its bright star was Abelard; but 
Lanfranc and Anselm may also be included in it; 
and William of Champeaux and Bernard of Clair- 
vaux, Roscellinus and John of Salisbury, Gilbert 
de la Porrée and Richard and Hugh of St. Victor 
each played his part in it. The building of the 
“Norman’’ Cathedrals of Noyon (1150), Senlis 
(1155), Laon (1166), Soissons (1175) owed its 
impulse to this revival and is a definite step forward 
to the great age of church-building. 

This second upsptinging of life had not spent its 
force before a third began. A new type of religious 
discipline appeared—more essentially Christian 
than the monastic—which did not withdraw men 
from the world but directed them and equipped 
them for service in the world. Of this we have 
the foreshadowing in the Cruciferae (1169) and 
the Poor Men of Lyons (1179), but its great and 
characteristic expression was reached in the Fran- 
ciscan (1209) and Dominican (1216) move- 
ments. With this comes the great age of scholasti- 
cism; and its heredity is clear enough, for its great 
“‘doctors’’ were Franciscans or Dominicans—Bona- 
ventura, Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Duns_ 
Scotus and others, reaching as far as William of 
Ockham, with whom, however, we are within hail 
of a new and different world. It is not amiss to 
point out that two of the greatest and most attrac- 


122 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


tive figures in the history of the public life of 
Western Europe belong to this age, Louis, Saint and 
King of France, and Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of 
Lincoln. This revival originates the golden age of 
Gothic architecture and saw the building of Notre 
Dame de Paris, and the Cathedrals of Reims, 
Chartres and Amiens. — 

Of the exuberance of the life of this period there 
can be no question. Between 1170 and 1270 the 
French alone built eighty cathedrals and five hun- 
dred churches of the cathedral type. ‘‘One of the 
most singular phenomena of the literary history of 
the Middle Ages,’ says Renan, “‘is the activity of 
the intellectual commerce, and the rapidity with 
which books were spread from one end of Europe 
to another. . . . Such and such a work composed 
in Cairo or in Morocco was known at Paris and at 
Cologne in less time than it would need in our days 
for a German book of capital importance to cross 
the Rhine.’’*? In this time there were also new 
beginnings of freedom—slavery was abolished in 
the whole of Europe except Spain, and in 1215 
Magna Carta was signed. ‘There were other other 
new beginnings too. That age produced Roger 
Bacon, the morning star of modern experimental 
science; both in music and in medicine there were 
fruitful new departures. And it may be plausibly 
maintained that it was this wealth of life that 
reached a golden and glorious sunset in Dante, But 
there is another side to this story. 


5. THE MEDIEVAL UNITY. It is a common- 
place that the medieval mind was governed by an 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 123 


ideal of unity, a unity of all life in God; not alone 
St. Augustine’s una respublica omnium Christian- 
orum, but a unity of every part and every interest 
of life. The great medieval controversy was 
whether the Empire or the Church was to be the 
groundwork and organ of this unity; and in the 
end the Church was bound to win. The Empire 
was interested primarily in a political unity, and 
its effort to realize it was never successful and only 
fitfully promising. England and France remained 
stubbornly outside the Empire, when they could 
not remain out of the Church; and France was on 
the whole with the Church against the Empire. 
Nevertheless, the Empire was, says Neville Figgis, 
“the grandest attempt in human history to base the 
structure of institutions on righteousness, political, 
social and economic, no less than religious’ ;*? and 
elsewhere he adds that the attempt was inspired 
by the ideal of a unity of religion, of government, 
of economics, of morals, of social life and outward 
culture.22, The Empire and the Church intended 
the same thing; their quarrel was as to who should 
direct the operations; and even if the Church had 
not had superior resources of scholarship, intellect 
and statesmanship at its disposal, it was certain to 
win if only for the reason that religion cannot for 
long be made the handmaid of a political system— 
a truth that the Church itself forgot in the days 
of its triumph and by its forgetfulness of which it 
was undone. 

But there can be no argument about the power — 
which the idea and the ideal of unity exercised in 
the Middle Ages.** Neither can there be any ques- 


124. NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


tion of the extent to which unity was achieved or 
that this realized unity was the work of the Church. 
Indeed, the only living interest of a general kind 
that the controversy between the Church and the 
Empire still has is in its effort upon the fortunes 
of the Church’s ideal of unity and its endeavor to 
realize it. | 

Into this subject, of which so much has been 
written, it is not necessary for our present purpose 
to enter in detail. As between the Church and the 
Empire, the honors were fairly evenly divided until 
the Papacy of Hildebrand. Hildebrand had indeed 
been the brain of the two previous pontificates— 
extending over a period of twenty-five years—and 
before he sat on the throne of St. Peter he had 
already stamped the image of his own mind upon 
the Papacy. Now, Hildebrand had a Cluniac mind, 
that is to say, a mind in which the Church assumed 
the shape of a religious feudal system. Cluny had 
formulated the idea and the method of Church 
reform with great clearness; the Church was to be 
the monastery writ large, an organization in strict 
dependence on a single head; and it was with this 
in his mind that Hildebrand ordered the affairs of 
Church during the quarter-century prior to his own 
pontificate. In him the claim to papal absolution 
became complete; for him the Papacy was the 
supreme governing power over all things and per- 
sons, temporal and spiritual; and a strict ecclesias- 
tical obedience was the only way of salvation. We 
have traveled a long way from St. Augustine and 
his civitas Dei; and indeed there was no room for 
such a civitas Dei in Hildebrand’s scheme of a 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 125, 


Church-State. Yet Hildebrand found aid and com- 
fort in St. Augustine. He accepts St. Augustine’s 
characterization of the political state as a magnum 
latrocintum, and shares his view that the place of 
the State is in the bosom of the Church. 

While it is plain that Hildebrand placed the 
Church in a strategic position from which the 
Empire never succeeded in dislodging it, he did so 
at the expense of curtailing the freedom and the 
spontaneity which is the essence of a living religion. 
He tried to make permanent and universal an order 
and a discipline which are fruitful only at special 
times and in particular circumstances—and perhaps 
only for some persons at any time. Hildebrand 
was sincerely anxious to build a Christian world, 
but he proposed to do it by feudalizing the com- 
munion of saints. And whatever St. Augustine 
may have thought of the Church and the hierarchy 
of his day, he would have been much astonished by 
the Hildebrandine organization of the Church on 
the basis of a secular polity. 

Hildebrand died in 1086, and it took a long time 
for the logic of his doctrine to work out its conclu- 
sion in the life of the Church. The brilliant epi- 
sode of Abelard in the next century proved that 
the thought of the Church was still far from the 
uniformity which later became the rule. The 
growth of the universities, moreover, shows that 
there was a very considerable latitude for enquiry 
and speculation. As the power of the monastic 
orders declined, education and learning found them- 
selves in a freer air; and while the overbold ran 
the risk of ecclesiastical trial and censure, there was 


126 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


not until the next century any body of thought to 
which authoritative appeal could be made. To be 
sure, there was St. Augustine; but he was hardly 
relevant to the purely intellectual controversy of 
the twelfth century. 

Indeed, one whole side of St. Augustine seems at 
this time to have been in process of elimination. His 
doctrine of grace, like St. Paul’s, implied a direct 
and unmediated relation between God and the 
believer; and the actual effect of this was to leave 
the main business of religion outside the jurisdiction 
of the Church. The Church was claiming authority 
over the whole of life; and if it was possible for 
the individual to “‘contract out’ of the scheme and 
to enter into private and independent relations with 
God, what then became of the Church? And to 
meet the case, gradually there was a withdrawal 
of the operation of grace from the realm of free- 
dom; and in its stead, a doctrine of grace mediated 
by the Church through the sacraments took shape 
and reached definite formulation, notably in Hugh 
of St. Victor.** Finally, at the Lateran Council 
of 1215, the process was completed by the inclusion 
of Transubstantiation among the dogmas of the 
Church. 

It would be untrue to the facts to regard the 
growing power of the Papacy as the consequence 
of a mere lust of power. The motives were mixed, 
no doubt—human nature in Popes being much like 
that in the rest of men. ‘There is in authority a 
tendency to grow fat upon itself, an inherent 
momentum that leads it to extend its scope and to 
increase its power, and with this goes a keen eye 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 1 Wad 


for things that mean power—wealth, prestige and 
the like. The medieval Papacy was never immune 
from this liability to degradation, and again and 
again its greed and corruption became a public 
scandal. Yet, by and large, it remains true that 
the medieval Papacy meant to build up a Christian 
world; and its actual influence upon society was of 
a purifying and humanizing quality.2> Innocent 
III, both in his dealings with France and England, 
insisted upon right and morality, “‘even when 
political advantage was risked by his action.’’?¢ 
And even in the act in which papal authority 
teaches its apogee—the institution of compulsory 
private confession in 1215, Innocent was directly 
concerned to remedy certain evils which had over- 
taken the older practice of public penance before 
the congregation. 

But this very circumstance shows how immensely 
the papal power had grown. The Pope was strong 
enough to impose a rule of uniformity throughout 
the Church; and it does not appear that there was 
at the time any effective lay protest against it. It 
is also significant of the drift of the papal mind 
that, while certain previous Popes had stood out 
as defenders of popular liberties, Innocent III issued 
a bull against Magna Carta. And perhaps most 
significant of all, it was this same Innocent who 
provided the authoritative theoretic justification for 
the exploits of the Inquisition,®? then only in its 
first puling infancy. 

The Inquisition may be said to have been born 
at the Lateran Council of 1179. Before that time 
there had been unorganized and local persecution 


128 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


of heretics, notably the Cathari in Northern Italy 
and France; but at this stage the influence of the 
Church seems to have been of a mitigating kind. 
On the whole it discountenanced harsh measures; 
and the death-penalty was not recognized. The 
first stage in the organized pursuit of heretics was 
the work of Alexander III, who in 1179 invited 
princes and others to take up arms against the 
Cathari and other heretical sects, and offered indul- 
gences to those who undertook the good work. In 
1184 severer measures were promulgated against 
heretics—exile, confiscation of property, demolition 
of their houses, loss of civil rights, and the like. 
But the significant innovation at this stage was the 
inception of episcopal enquiry. Bishops were 
ordered to take steps to examine suspected persons; 
the public was ordered to denounce all heretics, 
secret or overt; and public persons and bodies were 
called to assist in the work of repression on pain 
of forfeiture of office, excommunication and inter- 
dict. To this Innocent III added nothing, save the 
theoretical justification already spoken of; and 
acting upon that justification, the Emperor Fred- 
erick II instituted the death-penalty for heresy in 
1224. With this, the machinery of the Inquisition 
is virtually complete. 

It is not necessary to follow further this unedi- 
fying story. It sprang inevitably out of the logic 
of Hildebrandism. The religion of authority—in 
Church and State—is conformity; its method is 
regimentation; its ideal is the goose-step. And 
always, its end is revolt. The Inquisition had to 
come into being because the philosophy of the 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 129 


Hildebrandine ideal required it; there was need of 
an adequate organ to compel a conformity which 
could not otherwise be achieved. The Inquisition 
became for large portions of Western Europe a 
symbol of pitiless ecclesiastical despotism; and to 
this day the memory of it remains one of the great- 
est and most intractable obstacles to the reunion of 
Christendom. Coercion is, soon or late, always 
self-defeating; and the tragic futility of the Inqui- 
sition is shown by the circumstance that, during 
the period of its greatest activity, the Church was 
moving most surely and most rapidly to its greatest 
disruption. 

Yet we may not forget that in spite of all these 
tendencies there was still a rich religious life afoot— 
the life that produced Arnold of Brescia, Robert 
Grosseteste and St. Francis. Yet those three names 
foreshadow a new day. 

It is worth while to remind ourselves of the 
three critical happenings of the first quarter of the 
thirteenth century. In 1215, the inclusion of the 
Doctrine of Transubstantiation among the dogmas 
of the Church marked the final withdrawal of grace 
from the sphere of freedom: and the believer's right 
of way into the Holiest is henceforth formally 
denied to him. In the same year, the believer is 
brought further under the yoke of ecclesiastical 
authority by the institution of private compulsory 
confession. In 1224, the death-penalty was im- 
posed for heresy; and henceforth spiritual and 
intellectual freedom was under the ban. Obviously, 
henceforth the society is to be everything and the 
believer nothing save only as he subserves the ends 


130 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


of the society. The divine commonwealth had been 
organized on the model of the hive; and the finish- 
ing touches were given in the first quarter of the 
thirteenth century. But no sooner was the work 
complete than signs began to appear which boded 
ill for its stability. 


6, DISINTEGRATION. The Hildebrandine ideal 
had been realized; but it had overlooked two im- 
portant elements in the case. It had not reckoned 
with human nature; and it had left out the New 
‘Testament. 

Human nature can stand just so much of the 
“rubber-stamp’’; and when that point has been | 
reached it becomes restive. And once discontent 
is afoot, it is quick to seize upon occasions of criti- 
cism and revolt. One such occasion lay to hand. 
It was the growing wealth and pomp of the Papacy 
which were found to be in conflict with the sim- 
plicity of the Christian life as it was described in 
the New Testament. The father of this movement 
of criticism and of return to the apostolic ideal was 
Arnold of Brescia, a man of saintly and austere 
life who preached against ‘“‘the lawlessness of 
worldly possessions for spiritual persons.”’ ‘‘His 
contention that the clergy should forego worldly 
wealth and political power, that their functions 
and powers were purely spiritual struck a note 
which runs right through to the Gregorian papal 
system.’ In this attitude St. Augustine begins to 
reassert himself once more; for according to him 
the civitas Dei has no property rights save by suf- 
ferance of the civitas terrena. That Arnold derived 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 131 


his doctrine from St. Augustine cannot be proved; 
and it is more likely that it grew in his mind from 
his study of the Scriptures. Nor was he the only 
voice that was raised for apostolical simplicity. 
Waldes, shortly after the death of Arnold, sold his 
goods and gave all he had to the poor and began his 
great movement of lay-preaching—which despite 
cruel suppression and persecution survives to-day 
in the Waldensian Church. And after the death of 
Waldes the same witness was borne by St. Francis 
of Assisi. During his lifetime the Franciscan move- 
ment was kept in obedience to the Church despite 
the fundamental opposition of his ideal to the 
wealth and power of the Pope and the cardinals. 
After his death this opposition almost proved fatal 
to the order, and in the event it was the order that 
survived and the ideal that died, so far as the order 
was concerned. 

It must be observed that this movement, like 
others that we shall have to notice, was the product 
of the Church, an outcome of its own life, and 
that it was directed not against the Church, but 
against the Hildebrandine doctrine and practice of 
the Papacy. The Waldensian movement did indeed 
become strongly anti-ecclesiastical, but that was 
the result of the persecution which it suffered. But 
despite the feudalized habit of the Church, its life 
declined to accept the forms imposed upon it 
and broke out here and there in various kinds of 
insurgency. 

Indeed, Arnold of Brescia’s insurgency embraced 
another point besides the protest against ecclesiasti- 
cal wealth, namely, against the political pretensions 


132 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


of the Papacy. Here also Arnold was in the tradi- 
tion of St. Augustine: for though St. Augustine 
could conceive of and did actually describe a Chris- 
tian prince, it was unthinkable to him that the 
Church should ever arrogate to itself political 
power. It is true that he was willing that the 
secular arm should be called to the aid of the 
Church, but it never entered his mind that the Pope 
should claim or exercise a temporal sovereignty. 
But in this matter Arnold was not so much an 
originator as the symbol of a movement already 
afoot. The old tradition of Republican and 
Imperial Rome had never died out; and for some 
years Rome was governed on the republican pattern 
under the inspiration of Arnold—so completely 
that the Popes had to acquiesce init. But this spirit 
was to be found elsewhere than in Rome. ‘The 
doctrine of municipal self-government, stimulated 
by the growing importance of the middle classes 
in the towns of Lombardy, was beginning to take 
shape and to add to the forces that were under- 
mining the Empire. The principle of nationality 
was already beginning to assert itself, and with it 
the first slender shoots of democracy. It is curious 
that it was from churchmen who accepted the 
Hildebrandine Papacy that the movement toward 
political democracy received its first stimulus. In 
his discussion ‘‘Of the Rule of Princes,’’ St. ‘Thomas 
Aquinas, while he allows the advantage of heredi- 
tary monarchy in special circumstances, strongly 
commends the elective form as a general rule, evi- 
dently because each new election gives opportunity 
for placing restraints upon the royal power. 


‘THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 133 


This opinion may fairly be used in justification of 
democratic forms of government; and we may trace 
a similar view through to later writers. Within 
the Church it took shape in the conciliar move- 
ment—the effort to reduce the Papacy to a consti- 
tutional monarchy, an effort which failed, though 
an attempt to purchase success was made at the 
Council of Constance at the terrible price of the 
condemnation of Hus. 

Indeed, the whole conciliar movement represents 
at bottom the attempt of the layman to regain his 
footing in the Church. The principle of repre- 
sentative government is one whether in Church or 
in State; and the logic of Aquinas’ position was 
applied by the conciliarists as well to the Church 
as to civil society. It is true that the conciliar move- 
ment did not admit the laity into active participa- 
tion in the affairs of the Church. The Council was 
to be a council of clergy; but the logic of the repre- 
sentative ideal was carried to its conclusion by 
Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham, who 
admit the laity into the government of the Church 
through its councils. Ockham was still early 
enough to think in terms of the Empire; and in 
his scheme the Emperor was the representative of 
the laity in the councils of the Church. 

Further discussion of this point would lead us 
too far afield. What is to be noticed here is the 
growth of movements of criticism and protest 
against the Hildebrandine doctrine of the Church. 
And here in the revolt of the layman we have one 
of the main elements in the movement which was 
ultimately to bring forth the Reformation. After 


134. NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


all, there was nothing new in their view. One 
has only to read the Didache or the Apostolic 
Constitutions—second-century documents—to dis- 
cover that the government of the Church in its 
early days was representative; and in this movement 
the Church was only reverting to its own original 
principles. But the movement, despite the opposi- 
tion of the Papacy, was well afoot; and it was the 
defeat of Gerson, the leader of the conciliarists, at 
Constance, that at last made the Reformation 
inevitable. 


7. THE ETHICAL REVOLT. Reference has al- 
ready been made to the rise of the principle of 
nationality; and the two great forerunners of the 
Reformation, Wycliffe and Hus, were leaders of 
national religious movements. 

It is certain that the nationalist unrest was due 
very largely to the weakening of the power of the 
Holy Roman Empire and its defeat at the hands 
of the Papacy; but it is no less certain that the 
behavior of the Papacy itself went far to accentuate 
it. For the Papacy stood in men’s minds as a 
Church-State in rivalry to the lay State. It is, for 
instance, impossible to read the story of Robert 
Grosseteste’s dealings with the Papacy without 
realizing how much the papal taxation of the 
Church was alienating the English mind, and in 
consequence accentuating and confirming it in its 
‘nationalistic’ character. In France, St. Louis 
made frank and emphatic protest against the papal 
exactions and the abuses to which they led, and 
Robert Grosseteste’s sermon at the Council of Lyons 


‘THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 135 


in 1245 was a very remarkable and courageous 
protest against the luxury and corruption of the 
Papal Court. But Grosseteste was a papalist never- 
theless, “‘holding the Papacy to be the bond of 
union of Christendom and pleading for the purifi- 
cation of the Church in order that it may the better 
withstand its enemies in England and remove the 
dangerous disaffection of the lesser clergy and the 
people.”’*? It was at a later time that the Papacy 
succeeded in throwing England into a state of 
discontent and kindled the most formidable of 
movements of revolt against itself. 

The story of the movement gathers around the 
name of Wycliffe; and the distinction of Wycliffe 
lies in this, that the reaction against the power of 
the Pope and the hierarchy is extended into a criti- 
cism of the current theological orthodoxy. In 
Wycliffe, St. Augustine once more reappears—in 
his doctrine of the Church as a society of the elect 
characterized only by its observance of the rule of 
love, humility and poverty. On the whole, 
Wycliffe concerned himself chiefly with the reform 
rather than the doctrine of the Church; but he is 
remarkable in his deliberate popular appeal. Per- 
haps we may say that Wycliffe was responsible for 
the revival of preaching—itself a revolt of the 
prophetic element in Christianity against the pre- 
vailing sacerdotalism. It is true that he may have 
derived his “‘poor preachers’ from the friars, with 
whom he was at first in sympathy; but his russet- 
clad preachers with their homely speech represent 
a different type of appeal. And, moreover, the fact 
that he wrote “‘in the rough clear homely English”’ 


136 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


of the ploughman and trader of his day represents 
a new type of appeal, ‘“‘memorable,” says John 
Richard Green, “‘as the first of such a kind in our 
history’; and it was essentially ‘‘an appeal to 
England at large.” 

In the same way, Hus carried his appeal to the 
Bohemian people. Hus had caught the flame from 
Wycliffe, and the Hussite movement was own 
brother in intention—and alas in result—to the 
English movement; though indeed its immediate 
consequences were more tragic, for it filled Bohemia 
with war and confusion. 

But though the Lollard and the Hussite revolts 
ended in apparent failure, in the light of the events 
that followed we perceive in them foreshadowings 
of the disruption that was on the way. 

One other protest against the usurpations of the 
Papacy, which for the moment was equally futile 
but which derives importance from its author, was 
that of Dante. Dante’s concern was for the inde- 
pendence of the Empire as against the claims of 
the Papacy. Pope Boniface (1294-1303) had 
embodied the logical conclusions of the medieval 
doctrine of the Papacy in the Bill Unam Sanctum, 
wherein, under the figure of the seamless coat of 
Christ, he asserts that ‘‘a body politic with two 
heads is a monstrosity.”” From the “two swords’ 
passages he proves that the secular sword is to be 
used for the Church, though not by it. The tem- 
poral power is accountable to the spiritual, while 
the supreme spiritual power answers only to God. 
The other side was stated by Dante in his De Mon- 
atchia. He showed that universal monarchy is 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 137 


ordained of God, that the Roman Empire won its 
position through God’s grant and that the Emperor 
derives his authority, not from the Church, but 
immediately from God. Since all power is of God, 
if the emperor’s power is lawful at all, the only 
question is whether it comes from God directly or 
through the medium of the Church. Dante occu- 
pies himself with a careful demolition of the papal- 
ist argument; and his work was to remain for 
centuries the one effectual answer to all claims of 
the right of papal and clerical interference with the 
freedom of secular government. 

Now, of all the long series of protests—which 
all alike go back to the reassertion of the principle 
of Holy Poverty whatever other reinforcements 
they may have gathered on the way—begun by 
Arnold of Brescia, continued by the Waldenses and 
the Franciscans, by Grosseteste and Wycliffe, by 
Hus and Dante, found their answer in ‘‘the undis- 
turbed splendor of the Papal Court of the Age of 
the Renaissance.”’ 


8. THE INTELLECTUAL REVOLT. The refer- 
ence to the Renaissance carries us back once more 
to Robert Grosseteste, and this time in company 
with another Englishman, Roger Bacon, who 
together are the morning stars of the revival of 
learning. 

Medieval thought during the twelfth and thir- 
teenth centuries was dominated by Aristotle, known 
almost wholly through a translation from the 
Arabic version. ‘The tour de force of the intellec- 
tual life of the time was the Summa of St. Thomas 


138 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


Aquinas, in which he gathered up all things in 
heaven and earth upon the basis of an Aristotelian 
schema, and dominated by the traditional doctrine 
of the Church. This was and still remains the 
standard text for the scholastic theology. But apart 
from the Arabic version of Aristotle and a few 
minor works, the thought and literature of the 
ancient world were practically unknown in Western 
Christendom. It is the peculiar distinction of 
Grosseteste and Roger Bacon that they set afoot 
the movement for the collection of ancient texts 
and their translation. Grosseteste and Bacon were 
indeed almost wholly concerned with sacred and 
patristic texts; but the importation of Greek manu- 
scripts which became a busy commerce in the 
Renaissance period seems to have its first beginnings 
with “‘the aforesaid glorious Bishop,’ as Roger 
Bacon calls him. 

Half a century after Grosseteste’s death, Petrarch 
was born, and by 1341 he was recognized as the 
foremost man of letters in Europe. ‘The great 
interest of Petrarch’s life was the classical past of 
Italy, and he desired to see the ancient glories of 
Rome revived. He was the first who zealously 
collected Latin manuscripts and coins, and set him- 
self to cultivate a Latin style. He also applied 
himself to the study of Greek and advised Boccaccio 
to do likewise. It was not, however, till the end 
of the fourteenth century that there was anything 
like a revival of Greek learning. Thereafter the 
doors of the ancient classical world were thrown 
wide-open, and the new life of the Renaissance 
began. 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 139 


It is no part of our business to follow the com- 
plex course of the Renaissance. It had both its 
good and bad sides. It was a new birth of thought 
and art; and many priceless consequences have 
accrued to the world from it. But it also had its 
sinister aspects. 


What distinguishes the Italian Renaissance 
from such epochs of luxury and corruption 
as the French Regency is its contempt of 
human life, the fury of private vengeance, the 
spirit of atrocious faithlessness and crime. 
Italian society admired the bravo as much as 
imperial Rome admired the gladiator; it 
seemed that genius combined with force of 
character released men from the shackles of 
ordinary morality. Only a giant like Michel- 
angelo escaped the deadly climate. We see 
the violence of Michelangelo’s sublime despair 
in the immortal marbles of the Medicean 
Chapel, executed while Machiavelli was still 
alive—Lorenzo, nephew of Pope Leo X and 
father of Catherine de Medici, silent, pensive, 
finger on lip, seeming to meditate under the 
shadow of his helmet some stroke of dubious 
war or craft, while the sombre super-human 
figures of Light and Dawn and Day proclaim 
it is best to sleep and to be of stone, not to see 
and not to feel, while such misery and shame 
endure. 


This demoralization was one of the inevitable 
consequences of the opening up of the archives of 
old paganism, which tended to make for the secu- 


140 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


larization of life; and to this tendency the Church 
had no real resistance to offer. The Papacy had 
been seriously weakened by the ““Babylonish Cap- 
tivity’ in Avignon (1309-1378) and the great 
schism which followed it—in all a period of over 
a century; and its own essential worldliness made 
it incapable of resisting the drift of secularization 
in the world around it. How far this drift had 
gone is evident from the importance of Machiavelli 
(1469-1527). ‘Our religion,”’ said he, “‘has glori- 
fied men of humble and meditative life, and not 
men of action; it has planted the chief good in 
lowliness and contempt of mundane things; pagan- 
ism placed it in high-mindedness, in bodily force, 
in all other things that make men strong. If our 
religion calls for strength in us, it is for strength 
to suffer rather than to do. ‘This seems to have 
rendered the world weak.’’ ‘“‘He was laying down 
certain maxims of government as an art,’’ says Lord 
Morley; “‘the end of that art is the security and 
permanence of the ruling power; and the funda- 
mental principle from which he silently started, 
without doubt or misgiving as to its soundness, was 
that the application of moral standards to that 
business is as little to the point as it would be in 
the navigation of a ship.’”’* The Prince, “‘the most 
direct, concentrated and unflinching contribution 
ever made to the secularization of politics,’’ shows 
how far a distance we have traveled from the medi- 
eval dream of unity. It is the measure of European 
anarchy; and that in its turn is the measure of the 
failure of the grandiose dream of organizing the 
world on a basis of righteousness. And to this 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 141 


failure the Church itself by its worldliness, corrup- 
tion and luxury had contributed not a little. 

But this demoralization can hardly be laid at 
the door of the Renaissance. It was no more than 
a by-product. The spiritual significance of the 
Renaissance and its permanent worth lay in that 
side of it which we know as Humanism. And this 
must be regarded as a revolt from the shackles which 
the medieval system had put upon the human mind. 
It was in its origin an attempt to emancipate 
thought and education from the narrow scholastic 
routine of the medieval Church by appealing to the 
cultural value and significance of litterae human- 
tores—that is, of classical literature. Petrarch was 
the first of the humanists; but with him the human- 
ities were still to be regarded as aids and enrichments 
of the spiritual life. Later the movement went its 
way without much sense of its subsidiary function; 
and in its later aspect, as a more or less conscious 
revolt against scholasticism, it elevated itself into a 
pursuit valuable per se. But apart from its own 
direct literary and artistic achievements, its signifi- 
cance lay in the emancipation of the mind from the 
barrenness and dogmatism of medievalism. It was 
reaction from the wholesale regimentation of the 
Hildebrandine tradition and the rigid schematiza- 
tions of the schoolmen. For one thing, the recov- 
ery of the works of Plato sent Aristotle into the 
shade; and a new era of Platonic and Neo-Platonic 
speculation came not only to Italy, but to the whole 
of Europe. It was a bid for human freedom from 
the bondage of the politico-ecclesiastical system of 
the Middle Ages. 


142 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


It has been said that at the Renaissance ‘‘Greece 
came up from the dead with the New Testament 
in its hands.’”’ Undoubtedly the circulation of the 
New Testament in Greek and of the early Fathers 
showed glimpses of religion in an older and purer 
form; and Erasmus, greatest of the humanists, 
declared ‘‘that the highest object of the revival of 
philosophical studies will be to become acquainted 
with the simple and pure Christianity of the 
Bible.’’*? His aim throughout his life was a Chris- 
tian Renaissance, the source of which was to be 
found in a return to the New Testament and the 
older Fathers. His Greek Testament published in 
1516 and his editions of the Fathers were designed 
to promote such a movement, as indeed they did, 
but in a fashion which Erasmus had not expected 
and did not approve. 


9. THE RELIGIOUS REVOLT. We have had 
occasion to refer to the growth of nonconforming 
movements—the harbingers of the revolt against 
the reign of ecclesiastical uniformitarianism—in the 
early thirteenth century; and in spite of suppression 
and persecution they multiplied and extended their 
range over a great part of Europe. ‘They called 
themselves the “‘Brethren,’”’ and their position of 
dissent from the medieval Church was virtually 
identical wherever they were to be found. In the 
last decades of the fifteenth and the first quarter of 
the sixteenth century they were extremely active 
all over Europe. Their members were drawn from 
among the artisan class and especially from the 
printers of Augsburg and Strassburg. 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 143 


This was a movement of evangelical noncon- 
formity and was part of an active lay religion that 
existed and thrived in independence of the Church 
and despite its opposition. It was in a manner the 
wider diffusion of an earlier movement which had 
been born of a desire to cultivate the inner life. 
The complete schematization of the Christian life 
which reached its climax in the institution of com- 
pulsory private confession had in some respects 
deprived the individual of his spiritual independ- 
ence and freedom; and this turning toward the 
culture of the inner life was a natural reaction 
toward freedom from the life of outward rule and 
prescription which the Papacy had imposed on the 
faithful. “There had been mysticism in the Church 
previously; but it had become the sacramental 
mysticism of the Victorines. This later movement 
was—despite its social setting—intensely private 
and personal in its teaching and practice. It may 
be that it owed something to the Platonic aspects 
of St. Augustine—of whose teaching at that time 
none remembered much save what was grist for the 
papal mill. Nevertheless, the seeds of a genuine 
Christian mysticism were in his writings and may 
have sprouted in the mystical movements of the 
fifteenth century. In any case, we are justified in 
regarding these movements as efforts toward a free 
personal religious life at a time when the practices 
of religion had been largely reduced to external 
forms. 

Meister Eckhart, John Tauler, Henry Suso, John 
Ruysbroeck, the Friends of God, the Brethren of 
the Common Life—known best through their most 


144. NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


distinguished member, Thomas 4 Kempis—are the 
names which represent this mystical reaction. It 
is worth noting that they are all drawn from the 
German and Dutch area, and must therefore be 
regarded as a part of the ferment which was pres- 
ently to bring about the Reformation, though they 
themselves acknowledged the supremacy of Church 
and Pope. But this culture of the inner life could 
not go on without producing reactions without; 
and the growth of an inner spiritual freedom must 
needs create a demand for an external freedom. We 
have seen already that on the ecclesiastical side the 
time was ripening for the layman’s assertion of his 
right and duty to take his part in the affairs of the 
Church; and it was this, together with the devel- 
opment and diffusion of an independent religious 
life, that culminated in the protest of Luther and 
inaugurated the Reformation. It is true that it 
was a background of ecclesiastical corruption and 
rapacity, symbolized by Tetzel and his peddling 
of indulgences, against which the protest was 
formulated; but the positive principle of the Refor- 
mation was the affirmation of the full citizenship 
of the laymen in the Church, resting upon the truth 
of an independent personal religious life in which 
a man carried on his business directly with God. 
It was the great and triumphant return of the 
Pauline and Augustinian doctrine of grace. 

With the immediate consequences of the Refor- 
mation we are not now concerned. What is impor- 
tant is to grasp it in its historical perspective. We 
may fix the watershed of the period between 1000 
and 1518 somewhere within the first quarter of the 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 145 


thirteenth century. During the first period we 
observed that the dominant current was that of the 
consolidation of the Church on a feudal basis, in 
which the individual was made wholly subservient 
to the purposes of the society as determined and 
dictated by the Pope. “The second period is a period 
of disintegration; the system gradually fell apart; 
dissenting and protesting movements grew in 
number and power; a new spirit of freedom and 
personal independence began to reassert itself; and 
all this current of dissolution culminated in the 
Reformation, the blow beneath which the medieval 
system crumpled and was finally destroyed. The 
soul which the society had enslaved turned upon 
the society and rent it in twain. “The hive was 
broken up. 


10. PROTESTANTISM AND CATHOLICISM. The 
bifurcation of Western Christendom at the Refor- 
mation has governed Western history for the last 
four hundred years. 

“The two main features of modern history are 
the development of nationalities and the growth 
of individual freedom’’;** and while the period 
covets such outstanding episodes as the discovery 
of the New World and the Industrial Revolution, 
the main interest of the records gathers around 
the dual movement toward the independence of 
national groups and individuals. It may not 
unfittingly be called an era of particularism. 

St. Augustine had held the view that the right 
secular organization of the world was that of a 
multitude of small societies** and toward the close 


146 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


of the Middle Ages a Frenchman quotes the passage 
in support of the doctrine of national states. St. 
Thomas Aquinas held that nationality, involving 
community of manners and customs, was the best 
basis of a state and that small states are better than 
large ones. And there was therefore, had it been 
needed, a theoretic justification for the diffusion 
of the national principle to be found in ecclesiastical 
sources of the first rank. But such justification was 
hardly necessary. The gradual waning of the 
power of the Empire and, after the Reformation, 
the virtual disappearance of the Church as the organ 
of European unity made the separatist movement 
irresistible; and even down to our time the division 
of the world into national states has gone apace. 
The Irish Free State is only the latest term of a 
movement which probably even yet has not run its 
course. With the resignation of the imperial crown 
by Francis II in 1806, the last vestige of the secular 
unity of the Middle Ages disappeared. 

The Church, however, did not recognize the 
national principle within its own domain; and 
within the regions in which its authority still ran 
#t remained extra-territorial and non-national, and 
indeed became more unitary, more compact, more 
autocratic than in the Middle Ages. ‘““There was 
far less of the federal spirit at Trent than at Con- 
stance; and the letter of Carl Borromeo declaring 
that the last thing that the Pope would consent to 
was the voting by nations is expressive of the spirit 
which became dominant in the Roman Church. 
Everywhere we see the triumph of the unitary 
system.’’ And it was this tendency that gave rise 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 147 


to the ultramontanism to which more than one 
national state found itself compelled to make resist- 
ance. “The Decree of Papal Infallibility was the 
logical term of a movement which we can trace 
from the Council of Trent and the rise of the 
Society of Jesus; the doctrine of the divine society 
has finally hardened into an institutionalism which 
is catholic only in name. 

But at least the Catholic Church was free from 
secular domination from without; and it was this 
evil that befell the Reformation movement. Despite 
Marsilius and Ockham, the time for popular gov- 
ernment had not yet arrived; and the influence 
of Roman Law in Europe, while the Empire was in 
dissolution, led to the ascription to the lesser terri- 
torial rulers that which had hitherto belonged to 
the Emperor alone. This included a claim by the 
princes to spiritual supremacy within their own 
borders; and of the power which the Church had 
claimed and sometimes exercised over the civil 
authority, nothing was left in the reformed coun- 
tries. ‘The principle of cujus regio, ejus religio was 
laid down; and so came into being national churches 
whereof the titular head was the secular ruler of 
the nation. In effect the Church in the reformed 
countries became a purely national organization 
helping at once to maintain and to vivify the prin- 
ciple of territorialism. How far the nationalistic 
principle has entered into the heart of the Church 
is evident from the performances of national 
churches in war-time. The Church in the Prot- 
estant world has lost the note of catholicity and has 
materially added to the forces of divisiveness, 


148 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


Just as the medieval Church had to pay the 
penalty of ignoring the independence and freedom 
of the individual in its zeal for the divine society 
(and is paying it still), so Protestantism has had 
to pay the penalty of subordinating the doctrine 
of the society to the individual. What the Prot- 
estant Fathers meant to do was to affirm the place 
and the duty of the believer to deal directly with 
God without priestly mediation. Here was the 
spiritual ground of their revolt against ecclesiastical 
tyranny and hierarchic monopoly. ‘The doctrine 
of Free Grace asserted the soul’s “right of way” 
into the Holiest of All; but this was, perhaps 
naturally, expanded into a general doctrine of 
“‘rights.’’ “The time was indeed ripe for a declara- 
tion of the rights of the individual; but the affirma- 
tion of rights without a compensatory emphasis on 
“‘duties’’ is centrifugal and divisive, and a society 
governed by a doctrine of rights tends to be fissi- 
parous. It is no far cry from an emphasis upon 
rights to an undue exaltation of the subject of the 
rights; and it is doubtless this stress upon rights 
that has grown into the insolent and anarchic indi- 
vidualism of the Western World. This is the 
disease which is enfeebling and destroying democ- 
racy. For democracy was meant to be a manner 
of living together; to-day it amounts to little more 
than freedom to exploit one another. Puritanism 
was undone by its pride. It began with the idea 
of a theocratic universe; to-day in practice its uni- 
verse is ego-centric, and its fine flower is the modern 
doctrine of “‘success.”” “This doctrine of success is, 
like its first cousin, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the 


THE GREAT MISADVENTURE 149 


superman, the product of a despiritualized and 
desocialized Protestantism. Just as Catholicism 
has by its exaltation of the society above the indi- 
vidual become an institutionalism which is not 
catholic, so Protestantism by exalting the individual 
above the society has fostered an individualism 
which is not evangelical. 

This unbalanced individualism is the root of 
the fissiparous impulse in Protestantism and of its 
present polychrome sectarianism. Schism is born 
of spiritual pride; for the pride of the group is 
only the pride of the individual writ large. But 
it requires a double pride to provoke a schism— 
the pride of orthodoxy and the pride of dissent. 
Other ages have known the same disruptive temper; 
but it is doubtful whether dissidence has ever gone 
to so great lengths as in Protestantism. It is even 
true to say that where Protestantism is most 
rigorously logical, as among the Plymouth Breth- 
ren, it is also most vigorously divisive. A faint 
variation in emphasis or a shade of difference in 
the interpretation of a text seems to have sufficed 
to bring a new sect into being. It is some reassur- 
ance that the scandal of this wild sectarianism is 
beginning to shame Protestant churches into some 
effort—albeit timid and hesitating—to heal the 
breaches. It is not here suggested that some of the 
greater disruptions, like the Reformation itself, 
were not inevitable and even necessary in their day; 
but by this day the casus belli in most of these con- 
troversies has become a dead issue. In any case, 
respectability of historical origin does not justify 
a Christian society in perpetuating the separations 


150 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


of yesterday in the divisions of to-day. Our 
sectarianism is the reductio ad absurdum of 
Protestanism. 

So here we stand, amid the ruins of the medieval 
synthesis. On the one hand is the stationary hive 
of Romanism, on the other the wayward, unstable 
herds of Protestantism. Our hope of the Divine 
Society hangs upon our readiness and our power 
to make a new beginning; and that new beginning 
depends on a recovery of the original Christian 
impulse. 


PART IV 
THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 


1. THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH AND THE CHRIS- 
TIANIZATION OF LIFE. The nineteen centuries of 
its history have carried the Church far from the 
point at which it started. “That this should be so 
belongs to the nature of things; no institution can 
continue to exist in this world without continual 
modification, if it is to meet the changing needs of 
changing times. And though no existing church 
displays much family-likeness to the New Testa- 
ment ecclesia, yet every church may justly trace its 
lineage to it—-which circumstance carries with it 
the duty of the Church to review its record and its 
present condition in the light of its origin. 

In a world which has accepted the distinction of 
sacred and secular, of temporal and spiritual, the 
existence of Church and State as two permanent 
elements in life is taken for granted. But it seems 
almost certain that this situation was not contem- 
plated by St. Paul. A clinging loyalty which 
sprang from his Roman citizenship led him at some 
points in his career to ascribe a certain divinity to 
the office of the civil magistrate; but his conduct 
when his Christian loyalty came into conflict with 
the State showed plainly where he believed that his 
superior obligation lay. Moreover, if the doctrine 
of the societas perfecta is not explicit in the New 
Testament, it tended in that direction from the 

tor 





152 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


start, as the communistic experiment in Jerusalem 
and the subsequent development of judicial machin- 
ery within the Church show. But while the charge 
against St. Paul at Philippi, that he was proclaim- 
ing ‘“‘another king, one Jesus,’’ may be fairly taken 
as indicating his hope that a new empire would 
supersede the old (that is, unless the form of the 
charge is a misunderstanding or a fabrication), we 
have only slender grounds for thinking that St. 
Paul supposed the supersession of the State to be 
an immediate part of the practical politics of the 
Church. But when the Roman Empire assumed 
the shape of Antichrist in the eyes of Christians, 
the situation became different; and the apocalyptic 
vision of the Kingdom of this world becoming the 
Kingdom of our God and of His Christ seems to 
embody the expectation that a universal Church 
would become the terrestrial form of a world-wide 
theocracy. But the New Testament does not finally 
make up its mind between the view of the Church 
as a pilgrim body whose destiny lay wholly and 
exclusively in eternity and the view that it was a 
society that had an office and a destiny in history, 
whatever may be awaiting it beyond the horizons 
of time and space. And though through its contact 
with Constantine it had actually assumed for itself 
a position and a function as a part of the historical 
order, St. Augustine still thinks of it as ‘‘the pilgrim 
City of King Christ,’’ and he sees it passing through 
the world to the unseen heaven to which it belongs. 
He was not able to adhere to this view of it in a 
pure form because of the complications introduced 
by the now palpable existence of the Church as an 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 153 


organized polity in a recognized relation to the 
secular State. But, in any case, this secular aspect 
of the Church was to St. Augustine a purely transi- 
tory condition, for the world was to pass away 
as soon as God had made up the number of the elect. 

After St. Augustine’s time the pilgrim aspect of 
the Church faded away; and the medieval polity 
shows us the Church as an established institution, 
having made for itself a permanent dwelling in the 
world; and as we have seen, its relation to the other 
established institutions—the political body—raised 
innumerable questions and a long controversy. St. 
Augustine’s doctrine of the sinful origin of the 
State, and his consent, albeit reluctant, to the use 
of the secular arm for the suppression of the Dona- 
tist heresy gave the Church the materials of a doc- 
trine which in time asserted the supremacy of the 
Church over the State, and claimed for the Papacy 
the supreme temporal authority in Europe—and 
theoretically in the world. When this doctrine was 
falsified by the event, the papal claim to temporal 
sovereignty became more modest, and to-day it 
amounts to no more than that the Pope shall be 
sovereign within his own territorial domain, how- 
ever narrow that may be, because it is not thinkable 
that the Vicar of Christ should be politically subject 
to any earthly monarch. 

When the ideology of sovereignty and power 
began to color the thought of the Church it is 
impossible to say; but we may suppose it received 
its main impetus from the compact with Constan- 
tine, which was in effect a surrender to the tempta- 
tion which Jesus had withstood when he rejected 


154 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


the dream of secular power. But beneath the claim 
to being a societas perfecta and to the temporal 
overlordship of Europe there lay a spiritual dream 
and purpose that is of the very essence of the 
Church. It was a tragedy that this hope and mis- 
sion should have been stated in a secular or political 
idiom, and that the Church should have supposed 
that a secular form of organization was necessary 
in order to make the dream come true, for it thereby 
mated incongruities. “The Church’s task was the 
consecration of all life; and it supposed that that 
was to be reached by universal obedience to the 
Vicar of Christ. But the aim was to bring the 
whole of life under the rule of God; and it was this 
and no other purpose that underlay, at least in its 
beginnings, the papal claim to the secular no less 
than the temporal overlordship of the world. 
However perverse and self-defeating the strategy 
was, we should do the medieval Church less than 
justice if we forgot that the aim of the Papacy was 
to christianize the world. 

Nor is it realized always how much was actually 
done by the Church in establishing or at least in 
encouraging a Christian standard in human rela- 
tions. ‘The late A. L. Smith speaks of the Papacy 
in its earlier phase as ‘‘a power making for right- 
eousness’’ and goes on to illustrate the statement 
by a discussion of the order which the Church 
brought into the anarchical conditions that sur- 
rounded the marriage relation in the Middle Ages.* 
It should be remembered also that the consecration 
of marriage was carried so far that at the Council 
of Trent it was declared to be a sacrament in the 


arnerORCMALN! HE WORLD. 155 


full sense of a means of grace; and this can only 
be regarded as an effort to lift the relation of men 
and women from the plane of nature to the plane 
of religion. In the same way, the Church endeav- 
ored to bring the day’s work into the sphere of 
religion, of which the charter of any medieval 
guild would furnish evidence. Here are some 
clauses from the Charter of the White-Tawyers 
(leather dressers who finished leather in white) : 


In honor of God, of our Lady and all 
Saints and for the nurture of tranquillity and 
peace among the good folk of Megucers, called 
White-Tawyers, the folk of the same trade 
have ordained the points underwritten: 

First, they have ordained that they will 
furnish a wax-candle to burn before our Lady 
in the Church of All-Hallows, near London 
Wall: 


And it was in this temper that the rules proceeded: 


Also, that each person of the said trade 
shall put in the box such sum as he shall think 
fit in aid of maintaining the said candle... . 

If by chance any of the said trade shall fall 
into poverty, whether through old age or 
because he cannot labor or work, and shall 
have nothing with which to keep himself, he 
shall have every week from the said box seven 
pence for his support, if he be a man of good 
repute: 

If any one of the said trade shall have work 
in his house he cannot complete, and if for 


156 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


want of assistance such work shall be in danger 
of being lost, those of the same trade shall aid 
him so that the said work be not lost. 


The record of the medieval guilds is on the whole 
ambiguous; but at least some headway was made 
in the business of the including industry within the 
Kingdom of God. And it will be no ill day when 
the Church and the Workshop know they belong 
to one another in the unity of life. 

And the Market-place. For the distinction of 
commerce in the Middle Ages was the doctrine and 
the practice of ‘‘the Just Price.’” No doubt the 
law of ‘‘supply and demand’’ operated to some 
extent, but in the main Aquinas’ view held, that 
to sell more dearly or to buy a thing more cheaply 
than it is worth is in itself unjust and unlawful.” 
Aquinas’ discussion of the matter shows that the 
commercial malpractices of modern times were 
common enough in the Middle Ages, but the 
Church did by the doctrine of the Just Price intro- 
duce a principle of equity and order into commer- 
cial dealings. The Just Price was the central 
economic idea of the Middle Ages. The mainte- 
nance of the Just Price presupposes the existence of 
just men; and the extent to which the Just Price 
actually prevailed is testimony to the ethical dis- 
cipline which religion had induced in society. And 
this same fact is confirmed by the regulations of the 
guilds and by the standard up to which they 
endeavored to live until they became, as they did 
in the course of time, demoralized. The spirit of 
brotherhood and of communal responsibility was 


Ae GHORCH ING THE WORLD? 157 


increasingly diffused, as is shown by the regulations 
for the prevention of bad work and of the sale of 
defective goods, and especially by the statutes secur- 
ing the craftmen from unfair competition and 
providing for mutual help. 

This development went on chiefly in the cities; 
but in the country there was an effort to check the 
anarchy which the feudal system made possible. 
The institution of the Truce of God did much to 
mitigate the injury caused by the private wars of 
the feudal nobles. The Truce secured immunity 
for “‘clerks, peasants, merchants and noncombatants 
in general, even for animals, from violence; and 
religious edifices and public buildings were safe- 
guarded. During the whole of Advent and Lent 
and at Ember days, hostilities had to be suspended 
altogether between Wednesday evening and Mon- 
day morning.”” Nor was this all that the Church 
did for the socializing of life. “The growth of the 
merchant class and the religious practice of pilgrim- 
age set afoot much traveling; and the growing 
Christian conscience of the period did much to 
expedite travel. Fraternities were formed to protect 
merchants and pilgrims, to repair and keep bridges 
in order and to provide hostels for travelers. The 
few lighthouses that existed were maintained by 
the Church, and to this day in England lighthouses 
are controlled by the Brethren of Trinity House, 
a name which attests the ecclesiastical origin of the 
body that bears it. 

The Church undoubtedly was a power of social 
integration within its sphere of influence; and it is 
beyond question that despite the externalization and 


158 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


regimentation which were involved in the papal 
policy, there was a great deal of genuine popular 
religion of a personal spontaneous type. Its social 
effects, moreover, prove that it was a religious life 
essentially Christian. Mr. Coulton has recently 
shown the credulity and degradation of the popular 
religion of the twelfth century;* but there was 
nevertheless a religious life abroad which could 
produce a St. Bernard and a St. Louis, a Robert 
Grosseteste and a St. Francis, and it was out of tnis 
religion that the mystical and dissenting movements 
of later days emerged. It was also the spring of 
that ‘‘simple evangelical piety’ which existed in 
numberless German homes in the end of the fif- 
teenth century.* It was inevitable that this type 
of religious life should have come into opposition 
to the formal and institutional religion which was 
associated with the hierarchy; but it would be an 
error not to regard it as a product of the life of 
the Church, even though at a later time it could 
not find house-room within the Church. 

The inference is irresistible that there was a 
double stream of life during this period: one of a 
genuine personal religion with a definitely social 
outlook and effect; and the type of religious life, 
external, formal, authoritative, which was implied 
in the doctrine of papal absolutism. We should, 
however, do some injustice to the latter if we over- 
looked the fact that the papal authority did to some 
extent diminish the anarchy in personal relations, 
as in the case of marriage and private wars. It is 
worth some notice that in the regions in which it 
did a solid work of this kind it proceeded with 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD — 159 


caution, not hastily imposing regulations beyond 
its power to enforce. In the one case in which 
the Church, acting on the traditional view, con- 
tinued an unqualified prohibition—namely, against 
usury—it seems to have been unsuccessful. Where 
prohibition has an element of persuasion and can 
therefore evoke a measure of consent, it has some 
hope of being effectual—a moral not without its 
point to our own times. Moreover, it must be 
acknowledged that, during the period when the 
Papacy was not yet overwhelmed by the glamour 
of secular greatness and wealth and by the corrup- 
tions that follow this frame of mind, it meant to 
use its authority in the interests of the christian- 
ization of mankind. 

But the question remains whether that is a 
process which can be permanently expedited by the 
instrument of authority. The reaction from the 
medieval system would seem to show that, however 
effectual it may be at this point or that, or under 
a particular set of circumstances, authority as the 
permanent sanction of a society is foredoomed to 
failure. That order and discipline within the 
Church may require some organ of authority may 
be admitted; but it is questionable whether this 
authority can be exercised within the Church by 
the use of force. Indeed, it is quite evident that 
the Church had some qualms upon this point—the 
fact that it called upon the secular power to execute 
its sentences shows that it felt that the use of physi- 
cal force was incongruous with its own nature. 
But there is no final difference between the Church 
using physical force itself and calling upon the 


160 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


temporal power to execute it on its behalf. The 
Church in either case acknowledges the final appeal 
to force and with this acknowledgment accepts a 
secular basis for itself. Even the Reformers who 
looked to the secular magistrate to carry through 
the Reformation within their own territory seem 
to concede the Church’s dependence upon the use of 
physical force in the last resort. And it is to such 
people as Robert Browne, leader of the English 
separatists, that we owe the recovery of the idea 
that the Church has no concern with the civil mag- 
istrate at all save only in respect of its own few 
necessary temporalities. In his Treatise of Refor- 
mation without Tarying for Anie (1582), he 
asserts that ‘‘to compel religion, to plant churches 
by power, to force a submission to ecclesiastical 
government by laws and penalties belongeth not 
to them (the magistrates), neither to the Church.” 

But the medieval Church was deeply committed 
to the use of force. The story of the Crusades 
from the first, which Urban II urged for the recov- 
ery of the Holy Places from Moslem hands and the 
subjection of the schismatic Greeks to Catholic 
Christendom, to the later enterprises under that 
name which were turned against Christians nearer 
home, registers the measure in which the Church 
was secularized. War is the final court of appeal 
within the temporal realm; and under all circum- 
stances it is the sign of the failure both of reason 
and of humanity. When the Church in the inter- 
ests of its own inner peace or of its expansion 
resorts to war either directly or by proxy, it classi- 
fies itself finally among the temporal and secular 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 161 


kingdoms of the world. Nevertheless, with some 
exceptions, the Christian—or what was accepted 
as the Christian—intention of these enterprises 
must be acknowledged; but at the best, when the 
Church adopted the temper and method of war it 
not only defeated its own purpose but became a 
house divided against itself. After all it is not 
possible to serve God by the arts of Mars or the 
artifices of Mammon. Even Machiavelli might 
have supported the moral of The Prince by an 
appeal to the policies of the Pope. 


2. THE STRATEGY OF THE CHURCH. ‘The 
attempt of the medieval Church to bring political 
and social relations under its own mantle was 
implied in its conception of itself as a societas per- 
fecta stbi sufficiens. But the question must be 
raised whether its self-sufficiency required the 
assumption of political power, and whether its 
growth and its inward peace would not have been 
secured more fruitfully, as they were in its primi- 
tive period, by another kind of power altogether, 
namely, the power to suffer, which is, in its New 
Testament setting, an aspect of the will to love. 
‘The Church in its early days was a society which 
rested upon the common relation of its members 
to God and was bound together by their mutual 
love. “The Church of the Middle Ages became more 
and more an army, an organization of the military 
type, with its hierarchy of officers under the papal 
commander-in-chief; and the characteristic medie- 
val tendency reached its climax in the military 
organization of the Society of Jesus. 


162 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


But the Church would have been well advised 
had it preserved the Augustinan view of the origin 
of the State and accepted the logic of it. St. Augus- 
tine held that in origin it was the product of vio- 
lence and in effect a magnum latrocinium, a wholly 
unregenerate institution. But while it is impossible 
for us to accept St. Augustine’s account of its 
origin, nevertheless the actual circumstances of its 
historical origin as an organization for power make 
it inevitable that, in any association with the 
Church, it must either impose its own character 
on the Church, or the Church must give it a differ- 
ent character. This indeed the Church held it was 
able to do; the State might be brought within the 
covenant of grace and be baptized into the Kingdom 
of God. But in the event, it was the State which 
impressed itself on the Church: and while in turn 
the Church did to some extent mitigate the natural 
operations of the State, it is the politicalization of 
the Church that chiefly strikes the student. Now 
the State, as we have seen, actually arose out of the 
biological pressure which transformed tribal society 
into an organization of men for the sake of power; 
and that still remains the fundamental character 
of the State. With Thomas Aquinas we see the 
first beginnings of the idea of popular sovereignty 
and of government by consent; later, Marsilius of 
Padua and William of Ockham expounded the 
principle of popular representation in government: 
and this current of thought has borne fruit in 
modern democracy. Yet even existing forms of 
democratic government retain, beneath all their 
apparatus of representation, the principle of the 


ihe GHURCH IN, THE WORLD: 163 


appeal to force; and their behavior in war-time, 
in the forcible suppression of discussion and 
dissent, shows the underlying principle of their 
organization. 

‘This is of course not to say that there is no place 
or need in society as it is for the use of force; but 
the difference between the essential State and the 
essential Church is that the former is in the last 
resort held together by force—whether the force 
be vested in a despot or in a representative oligar- 
chy—while the latter is held together by love. As 
regulative principles of social order, force and love 
are antithetic, and are not to be reconciled. When 
the Church counted itself to be not only the King- 
dom of Heaven but a Kingdom of this world as 
well, it was trying to run these two hostile steeds 
in double harness; and in the event it failed. 

Moreover, this does not suggest that there is no 
need of civil government. There are and always 
will be certain public services which must be gov- 
erned and regulated by some central authority; and 
it is hardly to be expected that humanity will soon 
outgrow the need of police and judicial institutions. 
But we have lived to see the State claiming such an 
episcopate over the whole of life as the medieval 
Church sought to acquire; and the life of indi- 
viduals and groups has come to be “‘regulated’’ to 
an extent which seriously impairs personal freedom. 
The tendency of the modern State has been to 
become unitary and absolute, and to gather under 
its own mantle as many of the concerns of life as 
it can. It declines to admit that there can be any 
association of persons within its frontiers with any 


164 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


authority over its own members save such as it 
*““concedes’’ to it; and the logic of its claim embraces 
final authority over life and limb, over the mind 
and the property of its members. It is rarely that 
the State can make this claim effective; but the 
claim and the effort to validate it seems to be 
inherent in the State’s modern doctrine of itself. 

But the State can have no absolute character, 
for the simple reason that it represents only a provi- 
sional and transitory stage in the development of 
human society. In some ways it may be said—in 
these days of national states—to represent the crus- 
tacean stage in social development. In spite of the 
humanization of many of its processes within its 
own borders, it represents human society clad in 
a protective armament which may be used not only 
for the maintenance of security but for aggressive 
purposes. Its military, air and naval establish- 
ments are its crust; and as in the sub-human world, 
evolution was able to continue because some animals 
had the wit and the courage to shed their protective 
armament, so social evolution requires that human 
society shall put off its present crust. Disarmament 
is of the essence of further social progress; but with 
disarmament the State must necessarily assume a 
different character. 

The capital error of the Church was its neglect 
to carry out the implications of its own original 
doctrine of itself. It represented a higher type of 
life and a consequent higher method of social 
organization; and it lowered its own standard when 
it began to lay claim to political power. The State 
stood to the Church not so much in the relation of 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 165 


secular to temporal as in the relation of nature to 
supernature. When once the Church had accepted 
a mission in history, it should have remained in 
independence of the temporal powers and lived its 
own life in the world. It was a pure illusion that 
in its character as a societas perfecta it needed to 
exercise a secular authority. It was right in affirm- 
ing that the secular powers should be gathered into 
the Kingdom of God; but that was not done by 
the Pope assuming or claiming a temporal overlord- 
ship. It was to be done by a peaceful penetration 
of the surrounding world by its own life and its 
own principles. ‘That was its primitive strategy, 
and it succeeded. To be sure, the early Church 
suffered persecution; but persecution, so far from 
hindering, helped the diffusion of its life. The 
aims of the medieval Church were on the whole 
sound; but it accepted a strategy which was self- 
defeating. 

St. Paul’s figure of the Church as a “‘colony of 
heaven’ supplies us with’a clue to the real strategy 
of the Church. As we have seen, the purpose of a 
Greek or Roman colony was to diffuse the life, the 
speech, the culture of the homeland in an alien 
territory; and this it did by reproducing to the last 
detail possible the life of Athens or Rome in the 
settlement. Neither this nor any other metaphor 
is to be pressed in detail; and for our purpose its 
significance lies in the fact that the Church fulfils 
its own purpose in the measure in which it evokes 
its own quality of life—the life of the spirit—and 
its own social temper in the secular society which 
lies about it. It was to fulfil its mission by its 


166 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


preaching, its teaching and the witness of its own 
inner life and behavior. It was the strategy of 
“peaceful penetration.” It was no part of its 
program to capture the political machinery of the 
Empire and to use it for its own ends; it was rather 
to kindle the life of the spirit in the people of the 
Empire, so that the Empire itself might become a 
Kingdom of Heaven, and its machinery consecrated 
to the ends of that Kingdom. In the event, the 
Church would become the Empire and the Empire 
the Church; and both the Empire and the Church 
would be fused and resolved into a new society 
which would be both Empire and Church and yet 
neither. 

How much the Church has already done to 
diffuse its own spirit through human society is 
insufficiently recognized. Slavery was doomed to 
extinction when the Church acknowledged no dis- 
tinction between the slave and the freeman, and 
opened every office to the slave so that the slave 
Callistus could become Bishop of Rome. The 
modern hospital sprang out of the hospitality of 
the early Church; the school was at one time the 
peculiar charge of the Church: and the university 
grew and thrived under the wing of the Church. 
The sense of corporate responsibility for the poor 
came to secular society through the charity of the 
Church. We have already had occasion to remark 
the service which the Church rendered in minimiz- 
ing the perils of travel and navigation. And the 
measure of the Church’s achievement in the world 
is the extent to which these and other public serv- 
ices in which the Church was the pioneer have been 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 167 


taken over by society as a whole. It was out of 
the merciful ministries of the Franciscans that the 
scientific curiosity was awakened that produced 
Roger Bacon and the beginnings of modern experi- 
mental science; and it was under the shadow of the 
Church and in the service of the Church that Art 
awoke from the coma of the Dark Ages. It would 
be an exaggeration to say that the Church educated 
the world into a new valuation of life; but it is 
plain that it kindled in many ways a new interest 
in life and in a spiritual culture of it. In the main, 
the story of the Church as an imperial enterprise 
is a story of eventual failure. Its permanent suc- 
cesses are those which it achieved in its ‘‘colonial’’ 
character which was never in abeyance even in the 
period of its most grandiose imperial dreams. 

It is worth observation that such enterprises as 
public hospitals, the poor law and education have 
largely passed out of the control of the Church; 
and this may suggest to us the real mission of the 
Church on the historical plane, in so far as it has 
to do with social evolution. The dream of the 
Church spreading its canopy over the whole of life 
and gathering within its more or less direct juris- 
diction all the processes of the social life was an 
extravagance. Ina world which was delivered over 
to anarchy, it became its duty again and again to 
make some effort to introduce humanity and order 
into human affairs. Its organized charities and its 
schools were enterprises intended to redeem life 
from destruction. But when the city had itself by 
these means acquired the spirit of charity and a 
sense of the need of education, the Church could 


168 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


hand over these functions to it. It is, alas, only too 
true that the spirit in which and the purpose for 
which these services were originated are often for- 
gotten in the secular administration of them; but 
the fact remains that both the services and the sense 
of social responsibility under which they are con- 
ducted were brought into the world through the 
Church. It may not be the business of the Church 
to carry on education save only for its own imme- 
diate domestic needs; but it was and is its business 
to diffuse a spirit in society that will recognize the 
need of education and provide it—and in due time 
discover and provide the right kind of education. 
It may not be the business of the Church to main- 
tain hospitals, but it is the business of the Church 
to kindle in human society the recognized duty to 
maintain hospitals both for the relief of present 
suffering and for the scientific development of the 
arts of healing. And the more the Church can 
divest itself of the responsibility for these and other 
public services and entrust them to society, the more 
effectually is it fulfiling its own specific office in 
the world. 

For the Church itself is not the Kingdom of God: 
it is the organ and the instrument of the Kingdom. 
The Kingdom of God is an order of life and not an 
institution. It will have its institutions; and of 
these the focus and the source of inspiration and 
guidance should be the Church. “In my Father’s 
house are many mansions,’’ and there is a sense in 
which we may apply this saying to the terrestrial 
City of God. It has its mansions of Art and Learn- 
ing, of Industry and Commerce, of Compassion 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD _ 169 


and Healing; but they gather around the central 
mansion which is the Church whence they derive 
their vision and their vitality. It is never to be 
forgotten that the Church appears in the New 
Testament under the figure of the Body of Christ. 
By which St. Paul appears to mean that the Christ 
who in Jesus became incarnate in a body of flesh 
continues in the Church incarnate in a body of 
people; and it is the office of this Body to assimilate 
to itself more and more of the unredeemed tracts 
of life, assimilating first the nation and in turn 
being absorbed into it until the whole nation has 
become a body of Christ. The nation has then 
become the Church and the Church the nation— 
and the institutions of the nation, its organs of 
administration, its industry, its education and the 
rest have become functions of the Body of Christ. 
And the Church’s work in the world will be done 
when the School, the University, the Workshop, 
the Market-place, the Studio and the Farm know 
that they belong to one another and work together 
in the unity of life in God. “I saw no temple 
therein,’’ says the writer of the Apocalypse. The 
New Jerusalem will have no temple because it is 
all temple, a single house of God. We do not see 
as clearly as we should that it is the business of the 
Church to make itself superfluous, to disappear as 
a separate institution, by diffusing its own character 
and ministry through society as a whole. 


3. THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL ORDER. 
‘The Church is concerned therefore with life as a 
whole—nihil humanum alienum a me puto. The 


170 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


modern heresy that religion has nothing to do with 
business or politics is a symptom of the disintegra- 
tion that has befallen life. “hat the Church should 
not try to impose its own will upon commercial or 
political institutions goes without saying; but it 
belongs to its duty to declare what the regulative 
spirit and principle both of commerce and govern- 
ment, of education and art should be. Of formal 
relations with the State it should have none beyond 
those necessary to its tenure of such meager tem- 
poralities as its ministries may require. And it is 
obvious that it cannot endorse any specific political 
or economic doctrine or function. It has indeed 
the duty to criticize and even to condemn—if that 
be necessary—policies, whether economic or polit- 
ical, that violate or deny the values of life as it 
understands them. Here it stands where Jesus 
stood; for it was His way to put to two tests every 
policy, mode of behavior, dogma and whatsoever 
else affected the society He lived in: Does this thing 
make for the unity of life? Does it make for the 
increase of life—life more abundant for ever more 
and more people? 

All economic and political doctrines are relative 
and provisional; in a changing and moving world 
they must necessarily be so. The business man 
who speaks of the “‘law’’ of supply and demand as 
though it were absolute and universal is merely a 
‘fundamentalist’ in business. For it is obvious 
that every governmental regulation of prices, every 
trust, every monopoly, every gentleman’s agree- 
ment not to sell below a given price, does interfere 
with the operation of the law of supply and de- 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 171 


mand; and there are regions of commerce in which 
the law is nowadays hardly operative at all. “The 
law of supply and demand is only a statement of 
how prices will adjust themselves under conditions 
of free and unfettered competition; and the law is 
put out of action whenever competition is to any 
extent limited. And all economic laws are of the 
same relative character. In the same way, the 
whole laissez-faire philosophy derives its cogency 
from its individualistic premise; and socialism in 
whatever form rests upon a collectivist presuppo- 
sition. But neither individualism nor collectivism 
is an absolute principle; for the individual and the 
group have both alike their place and importance 
in a sound social philosophy. “The Church cannot 
therefore be concerned with either; and its own 
social philosophy requires a synthesis which em- 
braces both the individualist and the collectivist 
emphasis and transcends both in a single organic 
doctrine. But even then it cannot be concerned 
with the mechanics of industry and commerce; its 
interest in this region is in the spirit which animates, 
and the principle which governs the organization 
of the processes of production and distribution, and 
in the mutual relations of the persons involved in 
them. To be sure, the spirit and the principle may 
profoundly affect the mechanics; but that is the 
affair not of the Church but of the engineer. 

In the same way, political doctrines are relative 
in their nature. The Christian view of the infinite 
worth and therefore of the presumptive equality of 
every living soul may be said to point toward a 
democratic form of government. But so far no 


172 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


form of democracy has been evolved which would 
satisfy a Christian test of government. The party 
system with the doctrine of majority rule, govern- 
ment by debate and decision by counting noses, the 
party machine and the crack of the whip make all 
political discussion notoriously trivial and ephem- 
eral. And doctrines and policies that are evolved 
in the heat and smoke of party polemics seem to 
be a good many removes from the actual business 
of life. Dr. Jacks’ criticism of “‘government by 
talk’? derives its strength from the circumstance that 
the talk is chiefly party talk and is hardly ever 
illumined by a single eye to the good of the whole; 
and Professor Muirhead’s rejoinder that what we 
need is not the abolition of talk but government by 
the right kind of talk is well founded. But so long 
as the discussions of parliaments are governed 
mainly by the tactics of the party game, the right 
kind of talk will be the exception rather than the 
rule. It is difficult to see where nine-tenths of the 
political discussion of the present day touches the 
main business of life. This is not to say that we 
shall or that it would be well for us to outgrow the 
system of parties. There is need for the conserva- 
tive and the radical emphasis in the social organi- 
zation; and as in its present half-evolved state 
human nature finds it difficult to make a conserva- 
tive and a radical to dwell within the same skin, we 
shall continue for a long time to hive off into 
parties. But that will do no harm so long as the 
conservative party upholds the conservative ideal 
rather than the conservative party, and the radical 
party gives itself to the advocacy of the radical 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD _ 173 


ideal rather than the discomfiture of the conservative 
party. 

Mr. Edward Jenks after tracing the evolution of 
society through the tribal and military stages—the 
latter being represented by the national state as we 
know it—speaks of the emergence of a third stage, 
the contractual, or the stage of partnership.* It 
may be that the significance of the political and 
economic revolts of modern times lies in the effort 
to disentangle the individual from systems of gov- 
ernment and industry which deny him the inde- 
pendence and freedom to which he has a natural 
title, and that this new political and economic free- 
dom may be the prelude to a new type of social 
synthesis. Mr. Jenks sees the premonition of the 
partnership stage of social evolution in Rousseau: 
and the French Revolution may be regarded as the 
first step in clearing the ground for the new syn- 
thesis. Mazzini, after premising that the note of 
modern history from the Protestant Reformation 
to his own day had been that of individualism, 
Went on to say that the note of the future would 
be association or synthesis. There are already some 
signs of the coming of an era of partnership in 
industry. For some time past experiments have 
been made in the direction of profit-sharing, co- 
partnership and the like. The movement toward 
what is unfortunately called the democratic control 
of industry has made enough headway for its dis- 
cussion without heat. Practice however lags behind, 
partly because of the fears which the employers 
have of the effect of democratization upon indus- 
try and—too often—upon their own position; 


174. NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


and partly because of the incapacity of the great 
majority of the workers to rise above questions of 
wages and hours. Nevertheless, many more or less 
thoroughgoing experiments are being made, and in 
many cases with good success. “The extension of 
the partnership idea in industry will probably fol- 
low the road that it has traveled in the political 
region, namely, the gradual diffusion of the indus- 
trial franchise through the various grades of worker 
until every individual has his own standing and 
voice in the conduct of the industry. 

The extension of the political franchise must be 
regarded as an approach to the notion and practice 
of partnership in public affairs; and as in most 
countries of the West there is now a franchise 
virtually universal, the groundwork of political 
partnership has been laid down. ‘The next step is 
to supersede government by debate by government 
by conference. At the other end we have the 
League of Nations which, given a fair chance, may 
create the habit and practice of international part- 
nership. In that case, a great part of the functions 
of the modern national State will become super- 
fluous, and it will be able to give more thought and 
to spend more of its resources upon more domestic 
concerns. With the possible and even probable 
diminution of the need of preserving its unitary 
character, the State will regard the processes of 
decentralization with less reluctance than in the 
past; and in consequence politics will come nearer 
to the actualities of social life. But it is not at all 
improbable that, if our hopes of a coperative world 
are realized through the League of Nations, and the 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD _ 175 


reason for the basic military character of the State 
is removed, the State itself will have less importance 
and be superseded in its present primacy by the 
industrial and commercial organizations. It is not 
inconceivable that its functions may be confined to 
the oversight of judicial processes and police, of 
public health, and of means of communication, that 
is, to precisely those services which are rendered by 
the administration of a municipality. That event 
may still be far off, but it is at least not unthinkable. 

Now, this idea of the conduct of life by the 
method of partnership is a first principle of the life 
of the Church. The transition from coercion as a 
social principle to codperation is foreshadowed by 
Jesus; and St. Paul’s use of the metaphor of the 
body and its members shows us where he believed 
the cohesive energy of the Church to lie. The 
Kingdom of God is an order of life in which the 
regulative principle is partnership—which is simply 
another name for love. The word love has been 
so degraded by cheap and foul usage that its essen- 
tial meaning is not understood. In the New Testa- 
ment it is a comprehensive term which covers all 
the impulses and influences which make for human 
unity. It is an energy of integration born of the 
perception that we are members of one another, 
“the energy of a steadfast will bent on creating fel- 
lowship,’’ as the late Walter Rauschenbusch put it; 
and it ranges all the way up from the simplest act 
of willing codperation through varying intensities 
of comradeship and fellowship until at last, in asso- 
ciation with sexual affinity, it becomes the strange 
and beautiful fire that fuses man and maid into one 


176 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


flesh, one soul. The Christian exaltation of love is 
itself the evidence that its outlook is toward a 
society; and in what direction soever the principle 
of partnership begins to operate, there the Church 
will necessarily see the promise of the Kingdom of 
God. | 

If we are right in supposing that we are ap- 
proaching a time in which this principle of part- 
nership is to become regulative, then the Church is 
facing another period of great opportunity. At the 
Reformation, with its failure to realize its dream 
of human unity, it was the Church itself (Protes- 
tants are apt to forget that their churches are as 
much legatees of this Church of the Middle Ages 
as the unreformed papal Church) that broke up 
the fabric it had erected, and began its dissolution 
into its constituent elements in order to make ready 
for a new building; and now that there are signs 
that new building operations are—albeit somewhat 
tentatively—afoot, the Church has an important 
function to discharge. For it is the one society on 
earth which professes to be held together only by 
love: and it is its peculiar business to teach the 
world the meaning and practice of love. 

But for this function it is at present ill-fitted. 
Its divisions bewray its lovelessness. Its sectarian- 
ism shows its insolvency in love; just as in the evo- 
lution of mankind individual man has outstripped 
the evolution of his society, so the Christian society 
lags far behind the Christian man. Yet even here 
there are signs of hope. The greatest of all modern 
achievements in reunion, namely, the coming of the 
United Church of Canada, absorbing into itself the 


tHE CHURCH IN THE: WORLD) 177, 


witness and the tradition of Presbyterianism, 
Methodism and Congregationalism, and a number 
of movements of kindred intention show that in 
the Church the tide of love is on the turn after the 
long ebb. But it is not only in reunion at large, 
but in the witness of the single congregation, that 
love must be manifested as a working principle; and 
here it has sorrowfully to be admitted that the 
Church makes a poor showing to those who have 
any knowledge of the inner life of an ordinary con- 
gregation. The joyous fellowship that should be 
the life of the Church is notable chiefly by reason 
of its scarcity; and it is a commonplace how favor- 
able an air the congregational life of the Church 
provides for the poorer things in human nature. 
This condition can only be traced to the poverty 
of the spiritual experience of the members of the 
Church; and it must be regarded as a pathological 
symptom of extreme gravity. Nor is it likely to 
be removed save by a renewal of the life of the 
Church at its sources. 

This renewal must however be provided by a 
fresh discovery of the mission of the Church in 
the world; and for that it must go back to its own 
origins. There it will find that it came into being 
as the nucleus and the organ of a new type of — 
human society possessing a new quality of life; and 
if it interprets this in the light of modern knowl- 
edge, it will recognize itself as being the beginning 
and the instrument of a new phase of the divine 
pui pose in the evolution of life. It is the standard- 
bearer of a new advance. So far its performance 
has been meager and punctuated by failure; and by 


178 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


its dullness and perversity it has again and again 
made less for progress than for reaction. It must 
once more grasp the august and epic design of the 
Spirit of life in bringing it into being; and it will 
do that the more effectually according as it realizes 
itself to be the divinely appointed torch-bearer of 
the march of Life to its inscrutable goal. The 
Church has believed itself to be in the main line of 
the religious development of mankind; but it should 
startle it into a new self-consciousness and a new 
power, to understand that its ancestry goes back 
far beyond the awakening of the religious sense to 
the first minute beginnings of Life itself. 


4, CONSERVATISM AND DEVELOPMENT. There 
are in the life of the Church as in all life two ele- 
ments which we may perhaps describe as static and 
dynamic. It is this same distinction which the late 
George Tyrrell makes when he says that the Church 
requires two principles for its development; one a 
principle of wild luxuriance, of spontaneous expan- 
sion and variation in every direction; the other a 
principle of order, restraint, unification, in conflict 
with the former, often overwhelmed by its task, 
always more or less in arrears. On the one hand is 
the biological thrust, forever pressing on; on the 
other the instinct of conservation, the function of 
which is to secure and to conserve the gains which 
have been made. ‘The besetting danger of the con- 
servative principle is that it may degenerate into 
inertia and apply itself not merely to conserving 
what has been achieved, but to preventing any 
further achievement. It is indeed characteristic of 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 179 


human societies that, once having dug themselves 
in, they are unwilling to quit their dugouts. The 
acquired inertia of institutions constitutes the 
gravest difficulty of all vital progress. 

‘This is the biology of the movement which has 
gained considerable notoriety in our time under the 
name of fundamentalism. The conservative im- 
pulse in the Church expressed itself in the formula- 
tion of creeds. Now, so long as a confessional 
formula is regarded as a device for securing and con- 
solidating ground gained in the understanding of 
truth it serves a useful and necessary end. Even 
then it must be regarded as relative and provisional, 
as indeed it will always be regarded by those who 
remember that we live in a world in which knowl- 
edge and experience are progressive. It isa terminus 
a quo and not a terminus ad quem, in no sense a 
goal but a starting-point. Nevertheless, the inertia 
which is always lying in wait for life tends to make 
the creed a definition of ultimate truth, the final 
limit of the advance. The Church becomes en- 
crusted in its creed and invites the fate of all 
crustaceans. Meantime, all advance and explora- 
tion beyond this limit becomes suspect; and the 
person or group that is sufficiently venturesome to 
make a pioneering experiment is apt to find itself 
shut out of doors. Fundamentalism is, however, 
not merely a phenomenon of inertia; it is inertia 
become malignant, for it has not hesitated to 
threaten the excommunication of those who venture 
beyond the prescribed frontiers. 

It is good evidence of the essential vitality of the 
Church that the tendency to inertia has never been 


180 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


able to strangle its living impulse. Its essential life 
has always in the end won out and gone ahead, and 
the creeds have had to be patched up and 
expanded in order to enable them to keep pace with 
the Church’s life. Betwen 150 and 740 A. pD. the 
Apostles’ Creed appeared in no less than twenty 
forms. The biological thrust in the Church has 
never been wholly suppressed; it has refused to sub- 
mit to the restraints of definition and tradition, and 
it is impossible to say at what point it will overflow 
the neat and trim banks which schoolmen and doc- 
trinaires have built for it. 

‘The fundamentalist reaction is however unim- 
portant and must under the pressure of existing 
conditions disappear. For the movement of life 
has outstripped the definition of mid-nineteenth- 
century evangelicalism no less than that of medieval 
and post-medieval catholicism. To-day, the ortho- 
doxies of the Christian religion, whether Catholic 
or Protestant, have been outstripped by life; life 
has reached a new world of knowledge, of thought, 
of outlook. And as at the end of the Middle Ages, 
when the Church was trying to do business with the 
dogmas and the forms of a day that was already 
dead, the Spirit of Life through the Protestant 
fathers worked out a new faith out of the old 
Gospel that met the need of that new day, so in 
our day the Spirit of Life must once more call forth 
those who will state for us a new faith out of the 
old Gospel, if life and religion are not to be buried 
together in the same grave. And this new faith, 
while it retains all that is living and true in Protes- 


THE GHURCH IN THE WORLD. | 18] 


tantism and Catholicism, must yet transcend both 
as we know them. 

In the Protestant churches the most significant 
movement in recent years has been the reawakening 
of the sense of social responsibility—-which theo- 
logically has been connected with the idea of the 
Kingdom of God; and there has been an effort to 
achieve a “‘social’’ interpretation of Christianity, 
which however does not sit easily upon our funda- 
mental individualism. “The best we have been able 
to do hitherto is to add a Christian social theory as 
a sort of postscript to our evangelical orthodoxy. 
But this is a position which cannot be accepted as 
final, though we shall have to consent to it until 
Protestants have received what is, after all, the 
essential Christian experience, which is both per- 
sonal and social at the same time, so that men will 
not be able to disentangle their relation to God from 
their relation to society. And that experience when 
it comes will be a vision of life as a whole, dram- 
atized under some image of a City of God, of a 
divine commonwealth of men and women who seek 
together the true ends of life. And this new faith 
and experience will when it comes inaugurate a 
departure more momentous and far-reaching than 
the Protestant Reformation. 

It would be idle to say that it is the business of 
the Church to seek this vision. In a sense the 
Church has never lost it; but in these latter days 
of the world it has suffered great obscuration. But 
it will come as new revelation has always come. 
The chosen method of the Spirit of Life is to let 
light break upon groups of serious and patient 


182 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


seekers. [he spiritual experience which brought 
the Reformation was prepared and achieved in the 
groups and brotherhoods—‘“The Brethren of the 
Common Life,’ ““The Friends of God’’ and the 
like—who foregathered to cultivate a personal re- 
ligious life in the midst of the institutional religion 
of the medieval Church. And there are to-day— 
and for some time have been—groups of men and 
women who have seen afar-off the promise of the 
City of God, seeking together the vision and the 
power which will mobilize the Church once more 
for its great task. If historical analogy is to be 
trusted there will come through this corporate 
search a revelation which will in good time spread 
throughout the Church and set it on its true original 
course. “That the Protestant churches are moving 
in this direction needs no demonstration to any who 
know their recent history. The sense of social 
compunction has driven virtually all these churches 
to proclaim social creeds and programs; and the 
notable gathering in England familiarly known as 
Copec registers the ground gained by the renewed 
social consciousness. But we have yet to see a 
massive forward movement all along the line. 

But it is evident that the modern vision when 
it comes will not lead to the medieval development 
of the Church into “a social entity inclusive both 
of the sociological circles of religion and of the 
politico-social forms.’’® For while the modern 
movement is toward unity, it will be suspicious at 
any attempt at a unitary organization of the world. 
Both biology and history offer evidence that sug- 
gests that a free and abundant efflorescence of social 


Peer enone IN THEO WORLD: “183 


groups within and across national frontiers is not 
inconsistent with and may minister to the ends of 
unity even more than a central unitary control such 
as the medieval Papacy sought to establish. In the 
modern world the primary function of the Church 
is of the prophetic order; it is specifically a ministry 
of revelation, and it is by passing on the revelation 
and kindling in men and groups a longing and a 
passion for the City of God that it will accomplish 
its own purpose in the world of to-day. 


5. MORALS AND VALUE. There is very little 
more necessary in the realm of religious thought 
than that we should discard the notion that it is the 
business of religion to teach morals. “The business 
of religion is with ends and values. 

Morality was in its origin a discovery made by 
2 process of trial and error. Certain kinds of con- 
duct were found to be deleterious and others favor- 
able to the well-being of the group and its mem- 
bers; the former were condemned and prohibited, 
and the latter became the recognized rule. “They 
were the mores; and together they constituted the 
morality of the group. Of course, the difference 
between moral and immoral conduct has its roots 
in the human constitution and in the nature of 
things. The universe is so made that this behavior 
makes for well-being and that for harm. But the 
character of any mode of conduct could only be 
discovered by trying it out. Our moral codes have 
grown out of the racial experience of life in the 
world. The man who discovered that honesty is 
the best policy was probably a primitive business 


184 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


man who had his fingers burnt in a crooked trans- 
action; and it is probable that the market-place has 
always been a more effectual school of pure morals 
than the church. For morals are discoveries made 
upon a strictly empirical basis. It is of course true 
that, with the appearance of a moral philosophy, 
something in the nature of moral education became 
possible; and the habit of moral conduct, and with 
it the development of social life, helped to foster 
the growth of certain supra-moral values such as 
honor, sportsmanship, chivalry and the like, which 
tended. to encourage conduct that went beyond the 
strict requirements of the prevailing moral code. 
But morality grew out of the soil of life; it was the 
result of discoveries made in and through the actual 
business of living. 

But once morals have been codified, they tend to 
keep society in a static condition. It is indeed not 
necessary that the morals should be set out in a 
formal series of rules and prescriptions. “The con- 
ventional morality of an average English-speaking 
community is in the main an unwritten code, and 
none the less potent on that account. But whether 
the mores have been codified and have acquired the 
force of law or merely remain an unsystematized 
sittlichkeit, they tend to be regarded as registering 
the maximum of social obligation. "That was the 
position to which the Hebrew mores that had been 
formulated in the Mosaic Law had come in the time 
of Jesus, who saw that they were impeding the 
spiritual growth of the people. It is not indeed 
unnatural that a society should come to regard its 
mores as being permanently valid and sufficient. 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD _ 185. 


They have given the society survival and security; 
and when to this is added the weight of the herd- 
mind, it is inevitable that a society should resent 
and resist any infringement or alteration of its 
mores. Nevertheless, such an attitude brings on an 
arrest of development; and it was because He saw 
this that Jesus told His disciples that unless their 
goodness went beyond the conventional limits pre- 
scribed by the Scribes and Pharisees they could not 
enter the Kingdom of God. Probably most people 
who have looked upon the title of one of Nietzsche’s 
books, Beyond Good and Evil, have been too 
shocked by it to open the book. But Jesus’ teach- 
ing did actually require conduct which lay beyond 
the conventional good and evil of the rabbinical 
schools. Moral codes, like other human achieve- 
ments, are purely relative, save only in their recog- 
nition of a distinction between good and evil; but 
the classification of behavior as good or bad has 
notoriously varied with time and circumstances. 
Religion is concerned with morals only in a sec- 
ondary way. Its first interest is with the realm of 
ends. Now, so far as Christianity is concerned, its 
first postulate is One who is the ultimate source of 
life and the ultimate end of itsends. And its funda- 
mental interest is that men should be brought into 
the knowledge of this One and to share His life. 
Its primary ministry is to transform the natural 
man into the spiritual man, who partakes of the 
spirit or the nature of God. But while this is the 
primary aim of Christianity, it also embraces its 
corollary, the growth of a spiritual society which 
will also share the divine nature and be, as St. Paul 


186 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


suggests, a dwelling-place of God. Such a society 
the Church is ideally even now; and its business is 
to transfigure the world by the diffusion of its life 
through it. Its ultimate end is God, but what that 
means we cannot now know; and however inspired 
imagination may dramatize it, it can do nothing 
better than give us pictures that display a refinement 
and an enhancement of terrestrial beauty and happi- 
ness; and it can do nothing to show us what it 
means to God in terms of His own purpose. So 
that for the practical purpose of its terrestrial 
activity, it has to define a nearer and provisional 
end; and it does this in its ideal of the unity of life 
in time under the image of the Kingdom or the City 
of God. Here in this conception is the ground of 
those values which it is its business to reveal and to 
communicate to mankind. The Kingdom or the 
City of God is the regulative principle of the 
Church’s thought and teaching upon the conduct 
of life. 

Now, the values which the Church is called to 
proclaim and to reveal are of the “‘spiritual’’ sort 
as contrasted with the ‘‘worldly.” In the New 
‘Testament the term “‘world’’ carries two meanings. 
It is used to describe the universe of human life— 
‘God so loved the world’’; and it is used also to 
connote the sphere in which the end of life is con- 
ceived to be in immediate and palpable goods of 
the “temporal” kind—in wealth, fame, power, the 
satisfactions of sense. And over against this world 
the New Testament sets up the Kingdom of God, 
and while it respects and may sanctify temporal 
good, it yet exalts above it a spiritual good, It 


tHe CHURCH IN THE WORED:: . 187, 


shifts the emphasis from the outward to the in- 
ward; and while the “‘world’’ assesses a man by 
what he does or possesses, in the Kingdom of God 
he is assessed by what he is. The world’s criterion 
is quantitative; that of the Kingdom is qualitative. 
The center of gravity of interest is removed from 
the possession of things to the spiritual enjoyment 
of things. A modern novelist has said that “‘life is 
a number of little things intensely realized,’’ which 
saying is not far from the Kingdom of God; and the 
society that we live in is sick with acquisitiveness 
because it is deficient in the faculty of realization. 
Mr. Santayana has said that it is not the length of 
life that matters but its height; and that saying also 
is of the Kingdom of God. For in the spiritual 
region, the stress is (as I have said) upon quality 
rather than upon quantity; there the goods of life 
are the imponderables. 

But of this no man can be persuaded. It is acon- 
clusion that may indeed be established by a reason- 
ing process; but it may be a conclusion without 
being a conviction. It requires something more 
than a syllogism to make it an active principle of 
life. It only becomes a vital and regulative influ- 
ence when a man perceives that life has a tran- 
scendental meaning and end, which is an affair of 
revelation or vision. "The Kingdom of God does 
not begin or consist in doing or even in believing 
something but in seeing something. And this seeing 
is an experience of the kind sometimes called 
“‘mystical’’; but by whatever name you call it, it is 
a real and well-authenticated experience. And in 
those who have received the vision, the vision vali- 


188 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY, 


dates itself by its results. Seeing something is fol- 
lowed by believing and doing corresponding things. 
Of the psychology of spiritual vision, this is not the 
place to speak. Here we are concerned with it as 
the initial Christian experience. It is pertinent to 
observe that the idea of vision fills a very consider- 
able place in the New Testament; and there is a 
word concerning Moses in the Epistle to the 
Hebrews which seems very succinctly all that I am 
now endeavoring to say: “By faith Moses, when he 
Was grown up, refused to be called the son of 
Pharoah’s daughter, choosing rather to share ill- 
treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the 
pleasures of sin for a season, accounting the re- 
proach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of 
Egypt, for he looked unto the recompense of 
reward. By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing 
the wrath of the King, for he endured as seeing the 
invisible.” Faith, according to the same writer, is 
“the assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of 
things not seen”; it is the organ by which we per- 
ceive the supra-sensible, transcendental setting and 
end of life. In the Fourth Gospel, the initial Chris- 
tian experience is said to involve “‘seeing the King- 
dom of God’’; and the story of the man born blind 
is meant to be a dramatic exposition of the miracle 
of revelation. The perception of spiritual values 
is the breaking-in of a new and transforming light; 
and the experience is not wrongly described as a 
conversion—which is to say, an inner revolution. 
“All things are become new.” ‘“The former things 
are passed away.”” The man who undergoes this 
revolution is described as a ‘“‘new creation’: and the 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD — 189 


experience may be assigned to the category of 
“emergents.”’ 

As we have already seen, the first business of the 
Church is to bring this experience to man; but 
though the word “‘conversion”’ still remains in its 
vocabulary, it has largely left the business of con- 
version to the small sectarian groups that flourish 
upon its frontiers. ‘This at any rate gives the 
Church an opportunity of reconsidering what it 
means by conversion. For—in Protestant evan- 
gelicalism at least—conversion has largely been 
understood with reference to the current canons of 
decent conduct. It has directed chiefly at the vari- 
ous types of moral anarchy and self-indulgence 
which are commonly regarded as constituting 
‘sin’; and the transformation of a drunkard into 
a decent member of society is described as a con- 
version. A conversion no doubt it is; but conver- 
sion in the Christian sense is something much more 
radical than the rescue of derelict and degenerate 
individuals and their reformation into self-respect- 
ing and law-abiding citizens. William Blake seems 
to have grasped the distinctive idea of a Christian 
conversion rather more clearly than orthodox evan- 
gelical Christianity has done. That the natural 
man needed conversion Blake did not doubt: and 
he held a doctrine of original sin hard and definite 
enough to satisfy the straitest sect of evangelical 
Christians. But the result of conversion according 
to Blake differs very profoundly from the conven- 
tional view. According to the latter at its best, we 
are transfigured into saints; but Blake holds that 
we are turned into artists. ‘A Poet, a Painter, a 


190 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


Musician, an Architect, the man or woman who is 
not one of these is not a Christian.” 

But the main idea that underlies Blake’s doctrine 
is something that applies to the saint no less than 
to the artist, when it is properly understood. A 
phrase used by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch concern- 
ing John Donne really describes the sort of per- 
sonality that Blake sees emerging out of conversion. 
“He was one of the tribe of strong generative 
giants. . . .’ It was such a breed that Blake de- 
sired to see. For him, the evil of the world con- 
sisted in the icy iron-bound systems of thought and 
conduct which bind men’s souls and suppress their 
imaginations; and the redemption of men lay in 
releasing their creative instincts from their fetters. 
But the saint may be as creative as the artist. Sir 
Arthur Quiller Couch, on another page of the 
volume from which I have just quoted, repeats an 
observation of Newman’s that to invent a style in 
literature is “‘like crossing a country before roads 
are made from place to place.”” And we may adopt 
the figure as a good description of the kind of good- 
ness which is essentially Christian. Goodness is in 
the common acceptation the sincere effort toward 
conformity to a stereotyped system of conduct, a 
standardized moral regimen. But the entire mean- 
ing of Jesus in Matt. v is that the impulse of good- 
ness must be released from the bondage of precise 
rule and prescription and become creative, crossing 
a country in which there are as yet no roads. For 
instance, love begins timidly by setting a bound to 
revenge—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and 
no more; but, says Jesus, set love free and see how 


WHE GHURGH IN THE; WORED 191 


far it goes. It will abstain from retaliation alto- 
gether; it will go on to show that there is no ill-will 
by turning the other cheek; it will even go so far 
as to attempt to turn the aggressor into a friend by 
serving him along the very lines of his aggression— 
it will give him the cloak with the coat, and carry 
his baggage a second mile. Burke in a speech on 
India pleaded for a policy of ‘“‘hazardous benevo- 
lence’; and that may be a good way of describing 
the peculiar quality of Christian goodness. It is 
not conformity to a law however exalted and exact- 
ing; it is an impulse, imaginative, hazardous, origi- 
nal, creative. 

And here we find the essential difference between 
the effect of teaching morals and of revealing values. 
Morals make for a static character which moves in 
settled and well-marked grooves; but a perception 
of values sets the spirit free to take a road to which 
there is and can be no end. It mounts one peak 
only to see a higher ahead; it is impelled to outdo 
its own best, to transcend its own utmost achieve- 
ments; it is forever moving into a country in which 
there are no roads. But its perception of values 
gives it a direction; and though it may not know 
whither it is going, the way it knows. 

‘This, I venture to suggest, is what St. Paul means 
when he speaks of being free from the law. He 
is free henceforth because his conduct is determined 
from within himself. His life is no longer an affair 
of rule and prescription; and his conduct will be 
determined at any given moment not by reference 
to a code, but by the reaction of his sense of values 
to the circumstances of the moment. It is not 


192 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


permissible to speak of Christian ethics as though 
there were a definite and fixed system of conduct, 
classified under headings and sub-headings, and 
obligatory upon the Christian man. ‘The tendency 
to regard the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount 
asa ‘law’ is untrue to the genius and intention of 
Christianity. In the fifth chapter of Matthew 
when Jesus bids us turn the other cheek to the 
aggressor, he is not laying down a commandment 
but giving an illustration of how the man of good- 
will will act under particular conditions; and Jesus 
is not afraid to carry the logic of his principle even 
to the length of making the man of good-will act 
in ways that worldly wisdom deems absurd and 
fantastic. But that is always how a man looks 
when he makes a road into a roadless country. 
Blake is right when he thinks of conversion as 
emancipation. 

But he is no less right when he conceives of it 
as much the release of imagination as the release 
of will: for it is a release of the whole man. [If it 
were true that no man can be a Christian who is 
not an architect or a poet or a painter or a musician, 
it would go hard with many of us; for the absence 
of the technical faculty which can give outward 
and visible embodiment to a great emotion is a mis- 
fortune rather than a crime. And Blake would no 
doubt open the door of the Kingdom to the man 
who would be a poet but cannot. But that the 
quickening of the spiritual life stimulates the imagi- 
nation and quickens the faculty of aesthetic appre- 
ciation is beyond doubt. I remember reading many 
years ago a statement by a missionary in Central 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD = 193 


Aftica that, when their converts began to appre- 
ciate natural beauty, they knew that their work 
was beginning to tell. A good historical case may 
be made out that genuine religious revivals are often 
accompanied by an efflorescence of art. We have 
indeed seen how with the three successive spiritual 
renewals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries there 
came also the three architectural thrusts, the last of 
which culminated in the great triumphs of Gothic 
building. And if, in more recent times, spiritual 
renewal has not brought with it a renewal to art, 
it is because of the reign of the deplorable heresy 
which supposed that art was alien if not hostile 
to religion. It is one of the most reassuring signs 
of the times we live in that we are learning that 
there is not only no incompatibility between relig- 
ion and art, but that, separated from one another, 
they “‘both suffer impoverishment and decay.”’ 

But it is not into saint and artist only that con- 
version may turn a man; he may equally be a 
scientist. For the life of the spirit is concerned 
with truth no less than with goodness and beauty. 
Here Blake would perhaps demur; for to him the 
Reasoning Power of man it was that enchained the 
Imagination; and his fulminations against Bacon, 
Newton and Locke and others, “‘who teach doubt 
and experiment,’’ were inspired by his fear that a 
pure intellectualism might destroy faith and take 
the soul out of art. Nevertheless, while it is true 
that intellectualism has generally tended toward 
scepticism, even Blake could not in his quieter and 
more reflective moments have raised any protest 
against the disinterested pursuit of truth that science 


194. NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


ideally is. And had he lived into another century 
he might have modified his judgment. That the 
chief interest in science nowadays is its usefulness 
as an aid to earning a living or its value as an acces- 
sory to commerce and to the military arts does not 
alter the fact that its intention and its spiritual 
use is as a pursuit of truth; and the only true scien- 
tist is he who practices science as a disinterested 
search of truth, because truth like goodness and 
beauty is an absolute value. ‘The rest are mere 
hucksters. 

A conversion that is genuinely spiritual will be 
a conversion to these ultimate values of Goodness, 
Truth and Beauty; and it is the business of the 
Church to go out to make such converts. But 
before it can do so it must set itself to recover that 
“word of God which is living and active and 
sharper than any two-edged sword and... 
piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit,” 
and is able to release and to enthrone the spirit in 
the lives of men. 


6. THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC. But with the mat- 
ter of goodness it is necessary to dwell somewhat 
longer. For while science and art may in their 
practice be the monopoly of specially fitted people, 
the practice of goodness is the concern of every man. 
It is indeed necessary that the spirit of truth and 
the spirit of beauty should inform the practice of 
goodness—that our good works should be works 
of truth and beauty as well. But the practice of 
goodness is an affair of daily, of momentary con- 
duct; and it is essential that we should have some 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD — 195 


notion of what it consists in. To the ordinary 
man it is something that he sees in Jesus of Naza- 
reth; by common consent he was goodness in the 
flesh. And in Him goodness has been translated 
once for all into an image which he who runs may 
read. It has been said that Jesus had less to say 
than the Greeks had upon the other ultimate values; 
and that is true. Nevertheless, it remains that 
goodness, truth and beauty did dwell together in 
Him and dwelt so closely that they seem to be but 
a single thing; and that single thing St. Paul would 
have said was the Spirit. He exhaled goodness 
as a flower its fragrance, and His good deeds were 
as a fruit of a tree. The truth that was in Him 
spoke in simple unstrained words that were lucid 
and self-authenticating as stars. And the beauty 
that was in Him went forth to the beauty of the 
flower of the field and of the faces of little children, 
and clothed His wayside tales with an immortal 
loveliness. Having the moralistic background of 
the Jew, He had little to say of beauty; and He 
was less concerned in his public teaching with truth 
than he was with goodness. But goodness and 
truth and beauty dwelt in Him and are there for 
the understanding eye to see. 

Now, it is sometimes held that St. Paul threw 
a sort of speculative smoke-screen over the sim- 
plicity of Jesus; yet when he comes to matters of 
conduct no one may doubt his truth to the mind 
of Jesus. It has to be remembered that St. Paul’s 
writings were addressed to Christian societies, and 
that his teaching upon conduct is governed by that 
circumstance. It is moreover true to say that his 


196 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


interest is engaged only in showing and encouraging 
the kind of conduct that will make for the unity 
and the strength of the Church. But inasmuch as 
we know that he conceived of a time when the 
Church should have colonized the world, we may 
take his teaching as the exposition of the Christian 
idea of goodness. And it may be added that upon 
this question he had nothing to say which had not 
already been said by Jesus. It amounts to this: 
that the practice of goodness is the practice of the 
society-making graces. In other words, goodness 
is synonymous with love. 

The Christian mind can never lose sight of the 
divine commonwealth; and its valuation and criti- 
cism of conduct, whether personal or collective, is 
its effect in helping or hindering the City of God. 
Good conduct is social conduct; bad conduct is anti- 
social conduct. I have suggested already that the 
criterion by which Jesus judged behavior was the 
question whether it made for the increase and the 
unification of life—which is only another way of 
saying the same thing. And it is the same thing 
that Dr. Schweitzer appears to mean when he 
says that the rescue of civilization hangs upon our 
learning anew a reverence for life. But when we 
speak of social conduct we should be clear that we 
mean something different from the discipline and 
obedience by which an army is held together. We 
are concerned with an organic and not a mechan- 
ical society; and social conduct in the Christian 
sense is that collective and personal behavior that 
starts from a respect for the freedom and the 
integrity of personality. 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 197 


Here once more William Blake has something to 
tell us. He starts from his doctrine of the Minute 
Particular, which is the individual man, and at the 
same time “‘a divine member of the divine Jesus,”’ 
that is to say, an organic part of the ultimate human 
family whose soul and center is Jesus. Blake as we 
know waged ceaseless and furious war against the 
tyranny of abstract ideas, and denied that they had 
any real existence except as actual relations between 
persons. It is easy to utter loud-sounding generali- 
ties about justice and liberty, and to speak and to 
think of them as objective realities in themselves; 
but they have no actual being apart from persons. 
That is why so many crimes have been committed 
in the name of justice and of liberty. It is possible 
to deny them to men in the very act of defending 
them. We may belie our ideals by the very means 
we use to reach them. ‘The one sovereign sanctity 
is personality; the sacredness of justice and liberty 
is a derivative from this. They are holy because 
they are the only conditions under which person- 
ality can rise to its full stature; and they are not to 
be fought for by any method which dishonors 
personality. “That were to subordinate the greater 
to the less, to undermine and destroy the founda- 
tions on which one professes to be building. It 
is personality—at once a Minute Particular and 
the one real Universal—that supremely matters. 
“Labor well,’’ cries Blake. 

“Labor well the Minute Particular: attend to 

the Little Ones.’’ 


198 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 
And this is the heart of his ethic: 


He who would do good to another must do 
it in Minute Particulars, 

General good is the plea of the scoundrel, 
hypocrite and flatterer, 

For Art and Science cannot exist but in 
minutely organized Particulars, 

And not in generalizing Demonstrations of 
the Rational Power. 

The Infinite alone resides in Definite and 
Determinate Identity. 


Here surely is bedrock—the actual personality of 
individuals. This is the one sure, fixed point for 
thought and conduct. ‘True reverence for and a 
right relation to personality—this is the law and 
the prophets. 

But this right relation is defined by the social 
nature of personality. Its name is fellowship; and 
whatsoever destroys fellowship is anathema. Self- 
ishness, whether of the individual or of the group, 
is the abiding curse. 


Is this thy soft family love, 

Thy cruel patriarchal pride, 
Planting thy family alone, 
Destroying all the world beside?® 


This is Blake’s comment upon the jingo patriot- 
ism of his day, and it retains its original sting. 
Walls, whether of steel or stone, whether tariff 
walls or walls of false pride, are of their father the 
devil. 

The law of God for the life of man is reciprocity, 
mutuality; call it what you will. Ina world where 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 199 


men need each other and cannot do without each 
other, where exclusiveness spells starvation of spirit, 
the tempers and policies which sunder men from 
one another spring from a kind of atheism. They 
are, as Dora Greenwell says in a similar connection, 
a denial of God because a denial of men. Instead 
of the healing and unitive influences which should 
produce the fellowship of his vision, Blake saw the 
world overrun with passions of vengeance, and 
doctrines of punishment, which, while they are 
supposed to repress the evil of the world, deepened 
and widened the gulf which divides man from his 
fellows. Our human frailty makes it impossible 
for us to live together except upon a basis of mu- 
tual forbearance and forgiveness. The true life 
is that which in all its activities makes for human 
brotherhood. That man has found himself who 
has learnt to bind his brother-man to his heart in 
healing, forgiving, long-suffering love. 

Blake saw with his swift insight that this was 
the real distinction of the Christian principle of 
conduct. “There were great and notable virtues 
which men practiced and praised before Jesus 
appeared—there was love of country, the sense of 
honor, the passion for righteousness, the love of 
justice, the capacity for sacrifice. There is nothing 
distinctively or exclusively Christian about these. 
The one point at which Jesus taught a definite 
advance in the region of personal relationships was 
in His command that men should love their ene- 
mies. But this was a profound and far-reaching 
revolution. It broke down forever the traditional 
notion that the world was permanently and incura- 


200 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


bly divided into friends and enemies; it destroyed 
the midmost “‘wall of partition’; and His emphasis 
upon forgiveness is the sequel to this new principle. 
Forgiveness is the bridge that spans the gulf between 
me and my enemy. It was the faith of Jesus that 
the forgiving spirit was not to be resisted, and not 
even the infamy of His own condemnation and 
crucifixion shook that faith. This point Blake 
grasped with characteristic thoroughness; and 
though no good forgiver himself, he was the inde- 
fatigable preacher of forgiveness. ““The Spirit of 
Jesus is continual forgiveness of sin.’ ““TUhe glory 
of Christianity is the conquer by forgiveness.”’ 


Why should punishment weave the veil with iron wheels of 
war, 
When forgiveness might it weave with wings of cherubim?® 


Blake has summed up his philosophy of conduct 
in his vision of Jerusalem: 


Lo! 
The stones are Pity, and the bricks well-wrought Affections, 
Enameled with Love and Kindness; and the tiles engraven 
gold, 
Labor of merciful hands; the beams and rafters are Forgiveness, 
The mortar and cement of the work, tears of Honesty; the 
nails, 
And the screws and iron braces are well-wrought Blandish- 
ments, 
And well-contrived words, firm fixing, never forgotten, 
Always comforting the remembrance; the floors Humility, 
The ceilings Devotion, the hearths Thanksgiving. . . .1° 


And never more truly than this was drawn the 
image of that City of God toward which the 
Christian Gospel looks. 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 201 


7. ‘THE NEED OF RENEWAL. The task of the 
Church is plain enough. It has to make a 
revelation, to speak a word that will kindle 
in men a perception of spiritual values and 
enable them by faith to see the New Jerusalem as 
the goal of their hope and their effort. Call this 
critical and decisive experience what you will— 
conversion, the new birth, redemption—it is for 
the individual the door of a new quality and power 
and direction of life, a creative synthesis, and his 
initiation into that ultimate society, the realization 
of which constitutes the present phase in the evolu- 
tion of life and which is the prevailing interest of 
the New Testament. 

‘The task is clear, but the power is sadly to sack. 
The world is waiting to-day for the resurrection 
of the prophetic ministry of the Church. It is easy 
to pass judgment upon the failure of the Church 
and to reflect critically upon its present impotency, 
and we have had in recent years much diagnosis 
of the Church’s trouble and much prescription of 
remedies. On the whole it has been an amazing 
spectacle of shallowness and futility. Meantime 
the Church goes on ploughing the sands with 
admirable assiduity, but with no more profit than 
was to be expected. Yet all the time it should be 
as plain as daylight that none of its programs or 
“new era’’ movements or “efficiency devices’ is 
going to help it one single jot or tittle; and until 
the Church, through its ministry—whether clerical 
or lay—discovers the word of God for this day and 
learns how to utter it, it will remain in its present 
state of arrest. 


202 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


This is not to say that the Church is not dis- 
charging a number of useful functions in the 
community; perhaps, indeed, for that very reason 
it is not discharging its own first function. Too 
often the Church has resolved itself into an organ 
of social service and supposes it is justifying its 
existence in that way. It would take much paper 
and ink to tell of the extravagances which have 
transformed public worship into public entertain- 
ment, and of the curious mentality which supposes 
that something has been accomplished because a 
crowd has gone to church. Not long ago a confer- 
ence of advertising men in London discussed the 
problems of church publicity. One wonders what 
on earth the kind of thing has to do with a King- 
dom which cometh not with observation. Reason- 
able announcement of church services is obviously 
permissible and desirable; but to suppose that there 
is anything gained for the Kingdom of God by a 
campaign of ingenious publicity is itself evidence 
of a complete insolvency of spiritual insight. 
Indeed, we shall have to confess that the Church 
devotes itself to social service and resorts to pub- 
licity schemes and entertainment in order to keep 
going at all, since it seems to be no longer able to 
do its proper work. 

I am by no means suggesting that there are not 
churches which are discharging a fine ministry of 
consolation and encouragement; but even at that 
they are helping men and women to endure the 
world rather than moving them to transfigure it. 
By its sacraments the Church is doing no little to 
keep alive in men’s minds the idea of the sacred 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 203 


and to suggest to them the obligation to make of 
the whole of life a consecrate and a sacramental 
thing. Nevertheless, even so, the Church is chiefly 
marking time. The measure of its failure to meet 
the need of this time is to be found in the condition 
of its preaching ministry. 


That a man [wrote Carlyle in Past and 
Present] stand there and speak of spiritual 
things to men. It is beautiful even in its 
great obscuration and decadence, it is among 
the beautifullest, most touching objects one 
sees on the earth. This speaking man has 
indeed in these times wandered terribly from 
the point; has, alas, as it were, totally lost 
sight of the point; yet, at bottom, whom 
have we to compare with him? Of all public 
functionaries, boarded and lodged on the 
Industry of Modern Europe, is there one 
worthier of the board he has? A man pro- 
fessing and never so languidly making still 
some endeavor to save the souls of men: con- 
trast him with a man professing to do little 
but to shoot the partridges of men! I wish 
he could find the point again, this Speaking 
One, and stick to it with tenacity, with deadly 
energy; for there is need of him yet. “The 
Speaking Function, this of Truth coming to 
us with a living voice, nay, in a living shape 
and as a concrete practical exemplar: this 
with all our Writing and Printing functions 
has a perennial place. Could he but find the 
point again... . 


204 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


That was written in 1840; and the intervening 
eighty years have not robbed it of its point, nay, 
indeed, they have rather sharpened it. For by 
general report—for one who is himself a preacher 
must in these things go by hearsay—there seems to 
be but little point in the preaching that is to be 
heard nowadays. It is in many ways not to be 
wondered at. ‘The preacher has become a sort of 
maid-of-all-work to the community; a useful 
public functionary and committee-man; an admin- 
istrator and organizer of ecclesiastical machinery; 
a Jack-of-all-trades and master least of his own. 
After a week spent in good works, most of which 
he should have left to others, he settles down on 
Friday to put together a hurried salad of senti- 
mental and pious commonplaces on the basis of 
his conventional technique of text, expository 
introduction and three heads—as though the whole 
art of the sermon were that of stretching a scripture 
to cover a skeleton—and then he wonders why 
folk are not at church on Sunday morning. Here 
there is little hope until the preacher takes his ser- 
mon seriously and treats it as what it is—the main 
business of his life, not one of the irons which he 
_ has to keep in the fire, but as the fire itself—and 
orders the remainder of his active life on that under- 
standing. Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith has lately 
done a good service—especially to preachers if they 
but knew it—by publishing a selection of passages 
from John Donne’s sermons, and in his introduc- 
tion he summarizes Donne’s own idea of his 
preaching office. 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 205 


Donne, indeed, often makes use of musical 
metaphors when he speaks of preaching; the 
preacher, he says, is a watchman, placed on 
a high tower to sound a trumpet; his preach- 
ing was the trumpet’s voice; it was thunder; 
it was the beating of a drum, the tolling of 
a bell of warning; it was a lovely song, sung 
to an instrument; the preacher should not 
speak with “‘uncircumcized lips or an extem- 
poral or irreverent or over-homely and vulgar 
language’; his style should be modeled on 
that of the Holy Ghost, whose style was a 
diligent and an artificial style, and who in 
penning the Scriptures ‘‘delights himself, not 
only with a profusion, but with a delicacy 
and harmony and melody of language; with 
height of Metaphors and other figures, which 
may mark greater impressions upon the 
hearers.”’ 


It is true that Donne lived in the great days of 
English speech; Mr. Pearsall Smith speaks justly 
of ‘‘all the music and splendor of the great con- 
temporary speech’’; and the modern preacher is 
like all other modern men afflicted by the general 
debasement of English speech in our time. Never- 
theless, the preacher is not excused from holding 
his vocation in the high and august temper of John 
Donne: and he is in nowise excusable for poverty 
and sloppiness of speech, since he is living, or 
should be, within the daily hearing of the incom- 
parable music of the authorized version of the 
Bible. Mr. Augustine Birrell is reported to have 


206 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


said, in answer to a question concerning oratory 
in the British House of Commons, that there was 
none, and that what the House nowadays required 
of a man was “the just word, the clean phrase 
and no frills,” than which there is no more precise 
description of the speech of the English Bible. And 
into some such speech as that preaching should be 
cast—however great the requisite pains—if it is 
worth engaging in at all. The technique of preach- 
ing alone requires much more attention than the 
present ordering of a preacher’s life permits. 

But of more moment than this is the circum- 
stance that the preacher is set to declare ‘‘the word 
of God,’’ which means that the final significance 
of his utterance lies not in what he consciously says, 
but in the undertones and the overtones which by 
some sure and incredible miracle go with it. It is 
a well-known experience of the preacher that now 
and again the poor thing that leaves his lips is 
transformed on its way to the hearer’s ears into a 
living quickening word; and so poor did he think 
his thing to be that he hears of its effect with sincere 
astonishment. But it may be taken as sure that 
such effects are produced only as the stuff of his 
own life has gone into his utterance, aye, and some 
strain of life that transcends his own. His colors 
must be mixed with his own blood, and perchance 
also with the blood of Christ. Yet this cannot be 
unless he is sedulous and faithful in the culture of 
his own inner life, and in the discipline that keeps 
his mind informed, his reason supple, his imagina- 
tion lively and his intuitions swift and sensitive. 
Preaching the Word of God is a costly enterprise. 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 207 


But preaching is not the affair of the preacher 
only. It was said of the ‘Old Vic’’—that theater 
in a London working-class district which has pre- 
sented every authentic play of Shakespeare—that 
there the audience is a part of the cast. And it is 
no less true that the air and temper of the congrega- 
tion do either make or unmake the preaching. But 
there is a consideration that takes us far beyond 
this matter of “‘rapport’’ between pulpit and pew. 
Dr. Moberly has shown that the Christian priest 
is but the representative and organ of the priestly 
function of the Church as a whole; and in the 
same way, however strongly individual a preacher 
may be, he is to be conceived as the representative 
and the mouthpiece of the prophetic office of the 
Church. It is true that nowadays he is assumed to 
be teacher as well as preacher; but it is in his preach- 
ing that his first importance is still conceived to 
lie. And as preacher, he is as much the voice of 
the Church as a voice to the Church, perhaps even 
more the former than the latter. Not indeed that 
he is merely the exponent of the Church’s tradi- 
tional mind; he is rather to be the revealer of its 
living soul, the spokesman of its longing and desire 
and its “good news.’’ He does not stand and say: 
“Thus saith the Church,” but ‘Thus saith the 
Lord,”’ the Lord of the Church, who sends His 
word to the world through the Church. 

So that the renewal of the preaching-office of the 
Church is bound up with the renewal of the Church 
itself; and that is in the Church’s own hands. 


208 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY, 


8. THE SPRINGS OF POWER. The victory of 
Jesus on the Cross lay in the invincibility of the 
faith that bound him to God, and of the love that 
bound him to man; and the life of the spirit in 
the individual and in society depends upon the 
vitality and vigor of its faith and its love. 

Faith is a word which has varied meanings in 
Christian usage, and Dr. DuBose gives us a defini- 
tion which covers them all; it is “the setting of our 
entire selves Godward,’ a disposition which 
includes belief, trust, submission, obedience, expect- 
ancy and whatever else may be implied in our 
relations to God. It lies beyond our present pur- 
pose to discuss the psychology of faith; but biologi- 
cally it may be regarded as a conviction that there 
is a transcendental meaning and end to life, a 
conviction that expresses itself in a longing and an 
effort to attain that end. In the specific sphere of 
religion that end is identified with a living God 
who is love; and faith becomes an aspiration toward 
God and an effort to establish a vital relation with 
Him. Consequently, faith becomes a spirit of dis- 
covery and of exploration; it acknowledges no fron- 
tier to knowledge and experience short of God; it 
becomes what we may rightly describe as a biologi- 
cal impulse, not only the Godward disposition, but 
the Godward thrust of life. It is life’s organ for 
listening-in into the silence and looking out into 
the dark; its territory is the unknown region 
beyond the land’s-end of sense and reason. 

It has its own characteristic activity, which is 
prayer. It is worth recalling how much Jesus 
prayed and what place prayer had in His teaching; 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 209 


and the little company in the Upper Room when 
it found itself alone in the world fell to prayer as 
simply and as naturally as it sat at meat. And they 
thus continued until prayer opened out into vision 
and power. Essentially prayer is simply “‘the prac- 
tice of the presence of God’’; and it is a necessary 
and inevitable function of the spirit. It requires 
neither word nor gesture, though human frailty 
must have its word and its gesture as a gauge of 
teality; prayer is a mind turned purposefully God- 
ward and sending some hailing thought, a longing, 
a desire into the Unseen—and keeping on doing it. 
That is all; that is all that was done in the Upper 
Room; and the end of it is Pentecost. 

St. Paul tells us in one place that we do not know 
what we should pray for as we ought; but never- 
theless our prayers have to do with the Spirit who 
maketh intercession for us with groanings that 
cannot be uttered. So that they become part of 
the travail of God, in creation and in life, to bring 
us men to our estate of divine sonship, and the 
universe to its consummation. It is well to remind 
ourselves how stupendous a matter this of prayer 
is. We stand prisoned in a world of sense, closed 
in by horizons beyond which our eyes cannot pass, 
burdened with a common mortality; yet there is 
in us that which bids us look out into the dark 
beyond and to speak into that silent unknown; 
and it is the profoundest and most serious thing 
that we ever do. We do indeed degrade it to mean 
and selfish ends, making of it no more than a vehicle 
of little wayside desires; but the real measure and 
manner of this great thing is the gesture of Him 


210 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


who through the eternal spirit offered Himself 
without blemish to God. Every word of prayer 
however halting is the sign that “that which drew 
from out the boundless deep turns again home.” 
It is perhaps better not to bow the knee in prayer 
except one think of it as the greatest thing that 
mortal man can ever dare to do. It is part of the 
vast travail that brings this caravan of life ever 
nearer its goal. | 

But the life of the Church depends no less on its 
love than it does on its faith, We are as yet no 
more than apprentices in the art and experience of 
love. We have still to learn how much more love 
brings to us than it takes from us; and we have 
hardly begun to realize how much living fellow- 
ship adds to the strength of our life. It brings us 
balance and wholesomeness of judgment, knowl- 
edge and understanding, and certain intensifications 
of experience, things which are the salt of life. 
We have good reason to know how valuable can 
be the fun and good fellowship of the easy cama- 
raderie of an idle hour; and that is only on the 
surface of life. But when we reach the deeper 
levels of fellowship in a common purpose or a 
common hope, then more goes on than we are for 
the moment aware of. Our fellowship becomes a 
mystic market-place where we barter lite for life 
in a communion of love, a mutual transfusion of 
spirit by which life is fertilized and multiplied. 
The more momentous the concerns of our fellow- 
ship, the more deep-running and the more vital 
does it become. We become each other’s stepping- 
stones to the high places of life, 


THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD 211 


Personality stands between God and man, bound 
to God by faith and to man by love; and its growth 
depends upon the practice of faith and love. ‘The 
characteristic expression of faith is prayer; the 
characteristic expression of love is fellowship. But 
neither prayer nor fellowship reaches its full power 
except as they are practiced together; and in this 
lies the final secret of Pentecost. “There was prayer 
and fellowship; faith and love were fused into 
each other; the prayer created a new power of 
fellowship; the fellowship created a new power 
of prayer. Out of that fusion came forth the power 
and pressure of life that broke down the barriers 
of fear and timidity, and swept hostility and preju- 
dice out of the way; and the quickening, cleansing 
stream of new life started out on its course through 
the common ways of mankind. 

Pentecost still holds the clue to renewal. ‘The 
discipline of faith in prayer, the discipline of love 
in fellowship, simply and patiently accepted and 
exercised—than this there is no other way to 
revival. We are too much busied with “‘efficiency’’ 
and organization and machinery—all of which are 
good in their own place. But our preoccupation 
with these things is the symptom of the deficit of 
life in ourselves. Yet the attention we devote to 
them is thrown away if we have not the life which 
gives them the only meaning they have. 

We have to make a business of seeking this 
increment and renovation of life, if we are to find 
it. It is not enough to wait for it to happen; we 
shall have to go out of our way to secure it, to 
forsake trodden paths that have lost their vitality 


212 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


and resiliency, and to learn anew the neglected 
practice of faith and love in prayer and fellowship. 
It is a commonplace that the great forward strides 
of life in the Church of God have been made 
through little companies who did this very thing 
and went on doing it until the floods descended; 
and there is no other known way of spiritual 
renewal than this. 


nN 


SN Ut b&w 


ia; 
le: 


NOTES 


PART I 


L. J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment, 
p. 312: “The whole evolutionary process, both 
cosmic and organic, is one; and the biologist 
may now regard the universe as biocentric.”’ 

H. S. Jennings, Behavior of the Lower Organisms, 
p. 252 (Quoted in J. Y. Simpson, Man and 
the Attainment of Immortality, p. 238). 


. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 138. 


On this, see Julian Huxley, Essays of a Biologist, 
p. 46. 


. H. G. Wells in Men Like Gods, p. 66. 
. The bibliography of the Beloved Community is 


more extensive than is supposed. For other 
names see Lewis Mumford, The History of 
Utopias. See also Hertzler, History of Utopian 
Thought. 


. Heb. xi. 13-16. 
. Vernon Kellog, Human Life as the Biologist Sees It, 


p. 135: ‘Future man may be consciously deter- 
mined by man to-day. . . . Human evolution 
has been turned over to human kind itself to 
direct.”’ 


. F. W. Maitland in the Introduction to O. Gierke, 


Political Theories of the Middle Age, p. 27. 


. G. D. H. Cole, Conflicting Social Obligations, 


Proceedings of the Aristotlian Society, 1914, 
p. 154. 


In Law and Politics in the Middle Ages, Ch. VIII. 
In The History of Freedom. 


213 


214 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


13 


ats 


15. 
16. 


Ly’; 
18. 


wow Ne 


W. Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and 
War, p. 122. 

J. A. Thomson, The System of Animate Nature, 
II, pp. 574 f. 

Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 119. 

Acts xvi. 21: ‘These men do exceedingly trouble 
our city and set forth customs which it is not 
lawful for us to receive or to observe, being 
Romans.” 

Edward Jenks, Law and Politics in the Middle 
Ages, p. 300. 

L. P. Jacks, The Faith of a Worker, p. 16. 


PART II 


. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, pp. 25 ff. 


W. J. Perry, The Growth of Civilization, pp. 
195 ff. 
W. H.R. Rivers, Social Organization, p. 169. 


. On this, see Dr. Oman’s fine essay in Science, Relig- 


ton and Reality, ed. Joseph Needham, pp. 261. 


. In maintaining this view, I find general confirma- 


tion in C. Lloyd Morgan, Emergent Evolution. 
The word “‘emergent’’ as used in this book has 
the sense given to it by Morgan in this volume. 


. The subject matter of the latter portion of this 


section will be more fully treated in the pro- 
jected second volume of this work. 


. See C. H. Dodd, The Meaning of St. Paul for 


Today. 


. Jackson and Lake, The Beginnings of Christianity, 


I, p. 252; Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek 
Religion, p. 103. 


. Ep. ad Diognetum 5-6 (Quoted by T. R. Glover 


in The Conflict of Religions in the Roman 
Empire, pp. 159 f.). 


10. 


1g 


—a\ 
Noe 


— 
Ww 


a 
Ooo co N Sy Ui -b& WwW Ne 


NOTES pals; 


This section is to be read as a summary of conclu- 
sions; and the discussion upon which these 
conclusions rest is reserved for the second vol- 
ume of my projected “‘trilogy.’’ But the sum- 
mary here given is necessary to the general 
argument of this book. 

S. Alexander, Space, Time and Deity. Alexander's 
view is accepted, with certain modifications, by 
C. Lloyd Morgan in Emergent Evolution. 


. This section is a very inadequate summary of the 


subject. I hope to discuss the nature of the 
distinctive Christian experience and ethic in the 
third and last volume of this series. 


. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 119. 
. See John Oman, Grace and Personality, passim. 


PART III 


. In The History of Freedom, p. 27. 


W. M. Ramsay, The Letters to the Seven Chutches, 
ani 2s 


. Ulhorn, Christian Charity in the Early Church, 


Davey 


. Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, IV, p. 76. 
. Ulhorn, op. cit., p. 226. 
. See Newman, The Arians of the Fourth Century, 


pp. 242 f. (ed. 1883). 


. The passage quoted is from the present writer’s 


The Chutch in the Commonwealth, p. 35. 


. Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, I, p. 51. 
. Retractions, II, 40. 

s DeCiv: Det, XV. 

dbs Tt 8 A 

. Ad Marcell, 138, c. 15 (Quoted in Nevill Figgis, 


The Political Aspects of St. Augustine’s City 
of Giod'p.57,)" 


palJesoiu, Det:, Vi 24: 


216 NEW MAN AND DIVINE SOCIETY 


28. 
. On this episode see A. L. Smith, Church and State 


SUED LOL OD s Oy hoe 
. Seein R. L. Poole, Medieval Thought and Learn- 


ing, p. 7, a translation of the letter in which 
Gregory forbade the study of the Classics. 


wilbids pps 9k, 
. Robertson, Regnum Dei, p. 242. 
. On this see Nevill Figgis, Political Aspects of St. 


Augustine, pp. 84 ff. 


. D. B. Munro, The Middle Ages, p. 177. 
- Quoted by Henry Adams in Mont St. Michel and. 


Chartres, p. 140. 


. The Political Aspects of St. Augustine’s City of 


God, p. 101. 


. Ibid., p. 100. Figgis frequently makes this state- 


ment in other of his works. 


. Otto Giercke, The Political Theories of the Middle 


Age, p. 10; cf. for another angle, Henry Adams, 
Mont St. Michel & Chartres, p. 44. 


. On the neutralization of the Augustinian Doctrine 


of Grace, see B. B. Warfield in The Dictionary 
of Religion and Ethics, Il, p. 224. 


. See A. L. Smith, Church and State in the Middle 


Ages, p. 6; Robertson, Regnum Dei, p. 276. 


. Robertson, op. cit., p. 265. 
27. 


Epp. II, 1 (addressed to the magistrates of Viterbo 
1199): “According to civil law, criminals con- 
victed of treason are punished with death and 
their goods are confiscated. . . . With how much 
more reason should they who offend Jesus, the 
son of the Lord God, by deserting the faith, 
be cut off from Christian communion and 
stripped of their goods?”’ 

Robertson, op. cit., p. 261. 


in the Middle Ages, Lecture III, and F. S. 


NOTES 217 


Stevenson, Robert Groesterte, Bishop of Lin- 
coin, Ch: XIII. 

. Lord Morley, Miscellanies, IV, p. 16. 

weheidis pn. OO; 

. Quoted in Marcus Dods, Erasmus and Other 
Essays; see also Preserved Smith, Life of 
Erasmus. 

. Cambridge Modern History, I, p. 3. 

. See Nevill Figgis, Political Aspects of St. Augus- 
tine’s City of God, p. 58. 


PART IV 


+» In Church and State in the Middle Ages, Lecture II. 
. The relevant passages are quoted in H. C. O'Neill, 
New Things and Old in Saint Thomas Aquinas, 
pp. 244 ff. 

. G. G. Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion, I. 

. T. M. Lindsay, History of the Reformation, pp. 
12658 

. Edward Jenks, Law and Politics in the Middle 
Ages, pp. 291 f. 

. The quoted words are from E. Troeltsch; but I 
have failed to recover the passage. 

. William Blake, Jerusalem, f.55, lines 51, 60-64. 
MIDI ike 2s, 

. Ibid., f. 20, lines 34, 35. 

. Ibid., f. 12, lines 29-37. 

. W. P. DuBose, The Gospel in the Gospels, p. 149. 


Ae mua 


al 





4 


| He 
Y | i ? 





sa #/ 


: tap. 
pe Naty 











ee ae 


“ie Vea 





r wt 
a yf , y - 
é i. i ¥ 
hia i : : ay 
j F 
le teers he a ' win ; 
ee Bria 4 i 
7a } % é \ 
‘ pasue NA ha’ | % iy 
be E Wa } w i) f ; 
rar ef ; \ ‘ : : 
; > > i 
, ei y ee 7 
a er! ; Lia \ 
' ‘ " ) ; f mi j 
’ | 
ve OF } ‘ 
f ' : 
4 
af {3 s ‘ ; p : ; 
; : ous ; 
: * } } 
7 4 ’ f 
, nya 4s Y 
’ ¢ , 
& 
t at ; } 
: 
if? 
od ' 
i } . 
% 
« 
' rl 5? 
’ ‘ oY 
’ 
s 
i 
aT j ‘ 
¥ - 
be * ie j 
* ; 7 
: . > 
, 
a 
; : i 
hj ry 
‘i 
ts K 
GaiW) 4 
ay } 
§ ; ; 
; 
‘) 
‘a 
*e 
: 4 
‘ 
= F 
f 
4 ‘ 
u 
ry 
? { 
p 
{ 7 
’ 
3 ] 
% ‘3 
4 j ‘ 
' ve a ; 
1 a 
” 
e 
A ’ 
; 
; : 
: 
‘ . 
a i 
i 7 - , ee 
‘ ; 
‘ ‘ ue ives 
’ oot \ 
F 
i 4 Pe 
t 
id ’ 
« 
ay 
J 4 
a i ig 19 
i ae Po 
'f 
' = 
’ ri 1 a 
4 
Me | wy i | ; } 1 
: ‘ rg } . ¥. Ki 2 : 
; r -* J 
’ , f 
j of an if 
( af f , ' ‘ } ‘ 
ou ‘ *) 4 vs ‘ 
: *- 
‘ ‘ ‘ 
ih fF ¢ im} 4 ary sn i; 
ANT . V4 re hAD Vd taal Be 
7 . ’ a ry 1. ‘ 4 , 
, a 7 7 aed a 1 * ah SAS 
CLAY Vit fa d o 
i 4 
’ i i 
ye rin : i 





ya Ti 


; ; pa ae | , y at i A 
. ati fi a vas rd aA : J 
Pi GAY S| har Ay is hee 
4? y y fe a 







—— 
Se 
- 

- 








4 eee 


ur’ eo 
“as 





Date Due 


= @ 
i) 


Cz 





